Big Think

Question: Why do politicians so often mishandle scandal?

Matthew Nisbet:  Well, I think everyone's human, so obviously they are prone initially to certain gut reactions, they're probably not very strategic on how they handle that scandalous information or that controversy and they really need a third party advising them who's studied a lot of different cases and incidents of scandals and we're starting to see kind of generalizable strategies.  First get all the information out there and be truthful and, you know, there's a whole growing field of crisis communication now.  And I think it- it's like anything else that you really probably need to prepare for crisis and you need to have a plan in place that you can adapt to the situation when a crisis or a scandal does occur and if you're not prepared, you're going to make a lot of mistakes.