At least in Italy, every day the media are full of pandemic news, and hence it is becoming more and more difficult to stumble upon something genuinely interesting. Yet this article by Adam Grant for the New York Times certainly is. It deals with the sort of communication governments pursued during the pandemic. My main takeaway is the following sentence:
Fear generally works best for motivating one-time acts, especially those that feel risky. Last year, fear was probably an effective way to motivate people to get their first vaccine. But it tends to be less effective for driving repeated behaviors such as getting a second dose and a booster.
Whatever we think of the merit of their decisions and the measures they took, experts and governments just assumed that scaring people was the thing to do. Even today, with the Omicron variant, more and more European governments are doing just that. The problem, Grant suggests, is that fear-based communication is not sustainable; what happens with the passing of time is that we end up in “the boring apocalypse” (the title of his piece).
He writes:
Since 2020, scientists have made astonishing strides in learning how to prevent and treat Covid-19. Health authorities should be applying the same scientific discipline to communications about Covid. Some promising approaches include informing people that a shot has been reserved for them, inviting them to do their part in reciprocating the enormous sacrifices of health care workers and inquiring about what would motivate them to consider a vaccine.
Public health experts can also improve how the message is delivered. It’s not helpful to keep defaulting to what some vaccine skeptics dismiss as “fear porn” about Covid-19, or trying to neutralize fears of immunization with blanket statements that vaccines are safe and effective (How safe? How effective — and for whom?). Experiments show that communications become more convincing when they address counterarguments and acknowledge uncertainty. A more persuasive and honest message is that of course vaccines have risks, but the best available evidence suggests that the risks of Covid-19 are both far more likely and far more severe.
While Grant’s piece is original and worth pondering, it also makes you wonder why, with all the experience we have with communications, and with the constantly growing body of research on the subject (which is likely to be more familiar/more accessible to decision makers than immunology literature is), governments tended to screw up communicating about Covid-19, and now flirt with vaccine mandates without considering the downside. I may be influenced by the terrible communication we had in Italy, where the pandemic was moralised and became a battlefield for politicised scientists.
READER COMMENTS
Vivian Darkbloom
Dec 15 2021 at 10:59am
“Experiments show that communications become more convincing when they address counterarguments and acknowledge uncertainty.”
This comes close, but not quite, to admitting that in order to induce “fear” our political leaders and public health experts have resorted to intentionally exaggerated and dishonest claims. That is to say, they haven’t been telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the objective truth about any number of “scientific” issues surrounding the Covid pandemic. The message of that NYT article seems to be “it’s ok to lie as long as it produces the desired result (fear and compliance). When it stops being effective the propaganda tactics have to change. Since when is telling the complete truth about something genuinely dangerous not enough to induce fear? Isn’t this article an admission that those leaders were not just “following the science”?
That article really has a flavor of the tale of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”.
Monte
Dec 15 2021 at 10:16pm
I agree, wholeheartedly, with Vivian Darkbloom’s comment above. All of the fear-mongering, obfuscation, misinformation, and outright lying by our “experts” has done irreparable harm to the public trust. As the old saying goes:
Paul Hoppe Photography
Dec 16 2021 at 2:01am
Well…maybe it is impossible for governments to honestly address counterarguments without then admitting that the vaccines might be less effective or useful and more risky for let’s say young men. Maybe the people with the counterarguments are right. Once the government starts telling the truth as much as the certainty around the topic allows, maybe people start making different decisions than the ones the government wants people to make. There are essentially just two options: 1. Tell the truth and make suggestions but then government looses control over people’s decisions. 2. Try to nudge people into desired behaviors but then government has to … well there really is no other word… lie and manipulate in some sense. I’d rather live in first alternative. Governments ought to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth as best they can. This article contains way too many “nudges” for my taste and nudging very quickly degenerates into omissions of truth, bending of the truth, manipulation and finally outright lying.
MikeW
Dec 16 2021 at 10:45am
Hear! Hear! It’s perhaps worth noting that trying to persuade through fear has become the standard approach. (Maybe it always was.) That has been the approach with global warming for over 30 years now.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Dec 16 2021 at 6:56am
This seems to imply that “scaring people” exaggerating the risk they faced from not taking an action that was in the collective interest but beyond the individual’s interest was the intent of government communication. That was certainly the effect of the communication, but I think it was largely unintended.
First, I’m not sure that the risks to the individual were in fact exaggerated (by PH officials, the MSM is another matter). Second, failing to put forward the collective good that would come from the individual vaccination, and emphasizing the “safety” to the individual of vaccinations, left the implication that risk to the individual was perhaps higher than it actually was.
Vivian Darkbloom
Dec 18 2021 at 4:03am
“… exaggerating the risk they faced from not taking an action that was in the collective interest but beyond the individual’s interest…”
Isn’t the “collective interest” the sum of all individual interests? If so, who, if not each individual, is in charge of deciding each component part of that “collective interest”? Who deterrmines that felicific calculus? You and I and millions of others or Anthony Fauci? Is the function of the latter to honestly inform us or to dishonestly misinform nd ultimately coerce us?
Mark Brophy
Dec 17 2021 at 8:21pm
You know that mRNA injections are ineffective and dangerous when they’re promoted for people younger than 40, including children.
rsm
Dec 18 2021 at 12:48am
《it also makes you wonder why, with all the experience we have with ~~communications~~economics, and with the constantly growing body of research on the subject (which is likely to be more familiar/more accessible to decision makers than finance literature is), governments tended to screw up communicating about ~~Covid-19~~inflation, and now flirt with ~~vaccine mandates~~interest rate hikes without considering the downside. 》
Can you all see how this same criticism of government fear tactics should also apply to inflation? Why not simply adapt, providing public inflation insurance, as we’ll adapt to this flu with free vaccine insurance for those who opt-in?
Comments are closed.