What to Say When You don’t Know Yet
Leaders feel pressure to sound certain in a crisis. The research shows that admitting what they don't know, and promising a time to report back, protects the trust they'll need later.
On February 29, 2020, the U.S. surgeon general, Jerome Adams, posted a message to Americans in capital letters: "STOP BUYING MASKS." Five weeks later, on April 3, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that people wear cloth face coverings in public. A day earlier, Adams had explained that the first guidance reflected "the best available evidence at the time" and that new findings on spread by people without symptoms had changed the picture. Much of the public heard a different message, which was that officials had been wrong in capital letters and might be wrong again.
The guidance changed because the evidence changed, and that is how science is supposed to work. The damage came from the certainty of the first message. A statement that had left room for new evidence would have made the April update look like progress. The all-caps version made it look like a reversal.
Certainty Is a Loan Against Future Credibility
Every crisis opens with a gap between what leaders know and what the public wants to hear. Officials facing a chemical spill or a disease outbreak feel strong pressure to close that gap with confident language. Confident language buys calm for a day or two. When the facts shift, as they almost always do in the first week of a crisis, the institution pays for that calm in lost belief.
Researchers at University College London tested this directly. In a 2022 randomized trial published in BMJ Open, Eleonore Batteux and her colleagues showed 328 U.K. adults a government announcement about a COVID-19 vaccine, written either with certainty or with honest caveats. Participants then saw information that contradicted the announcement. Those who had received the certain version lost more trust in the government, and more of their intention to get vaccinated, than those who had received the version that acknowledged uncertainty.
Honesty About Limits Holds Up
Larger studies point the same way. At the University of Cambridge, Anne Marthe van der Bles and her colleagues ran five experiments with 5,780 participants, including a field test on BBC News online, published in PNAS in 2020. Presenting an estimate with its numerical range, such as unemployment at 3.9% with a likely range of 3.7% to 4.1%, helped readers understand the uncertainty without lowering their trust in the number or in the source that published it.
Michael Bang Petersen and his colleagues at Aarhus University studied 13,000 people in the United States and Denmark for a 2021 PNAS paper. Open discussion of a vaccine's side effects lowered acceptance somewhat but raised trust in health authorities. Vague, reassuring messages did worse on both counts, and the researchers found that vagueness left people feeling they might be misled, which fed conspiracy theories.
The federal government's own crisis guidance has said this for years. The CDC's Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication manual tells officials that accurate information "can include what is known, what is not known, and what is being done to fill in the gaps."
What This Means for Communicators
People tolerate uncertainty far better than they tolerate surprise. A public that hears "we don't know yet" from an official who also explains how and when the answer will come treats the gap as part of the work. A public that hears confident claims later reversed treats every future statement as suspect, including the accurate ones.
The update schedule matters as much as the content. Silence during a crisis gives rumors room to spread, and a promised briefing that never happens confirms the public's worst suspicion, which is that officials are hiding something. An institution that sets a time for its next update and keeps it, even with nothing new to report, builds credibility with every appointment it honors.
The Three-Part Statement
Write every crisis statement in three parts, in this order. Each part answers a question the public is already asking.
What we know. State each confirmed fact with the time you confirmed it and its source. For example: "At 6:40 this morning, a water main broke on the city's east side. Water service is off for about 4,000 homes, according to the utility's field crews."
What we don't know yet. Name the open questions and what the institution is doing to answer them. For example: "We don't yet know whether the break affected water quality in nearby lines. The health department is testing samples now."
When we'll update you. Give a specific time and place, and treat it as a promise. For example: "We'll post the test results on the city's website by 4 p.m. today, and we'll update this page every three hours until service is restored."
The deliverable is a one-page crisis statement template with those three headings and a filled-in example for your most likely emergency. Name the person who owns each update, and approve the template with leadership in a quiet month, so the first statement in a real crisis already follows it.
Tell people what you don't know yet, and keep every update appointment you make, even the ones with nothing new to report.
Laura Rodriguez-Carbone was a federal public servant across 7 agencies including CMS, NIH, FDA, and FEMA before being purged in 2025. She founded Explainer Civic Strategies, a Lakewood, Ohio, firm that helps public institutions earn and keep the public's trust. Learn more at explainerconsulting.com.
