Fear, Sex, and Pandemic - Horrible Outcomes Don't Change Behavior

by Carol Dunn

Published August 08, 2009 @ 11:37AM PT

(photo credit:Jimee, Jackie, Tom & Asha)

Six reasons Pandemic Risk Communicators need to abandon the use of ‘the horrible outcome' as an emotional lever for funding and action.

1. Only a small percentage of the public will respond to the ‘useful parts' of the message and change habits, almost everyone's sub-conscious will remember the "danger" bit. Our wiring makes us strongly inclined to reject thoughts of future risk.
2. All ‘call to action' messages that trigger our fear response-are not sustainable, healthy, or useful. The fear response is supposed to provide a surge of activity to get out of a problem that is supposed to end so the system can normalize.  Sustained triggering of the fear response leads to excessive stress and burn out. Effective preparation for Pandemic flu doesn't require a surge of focus and energy, instead it requires changes to lifestyles and habits.Fear response is very useful for achieving funding-explain the possible situation to decision makers and you can succeed in having a short term burst of action: the decision maker can allocate funding-then their system go back to normal-they've funded the problem, done their bit and can relax.
3. It's hard to make good decisions if your subconscious thinks you may be in mortal danger, so the message hurts more than helps. Having explained in vivid detail the horrible consequences of non action, those consequences become the focus of thoughts when there are signs that a pandemic maybe starting. Even the individuals who adopted the message have the image of what will be happening to everyone else, and they must get past that image to act.  It is almost impossible to make good reasoned decisions in this circumstance, and that is what we saw.
4. It creates misleading expectations about a severe pandemic is like By creating a vivid narrative of a pandemic emphasizing the number of deaths and the risk of social breakdown from a pandemic, it is very easy to have the impression that life under pandemic that is vastly different than what it actually is like.  I suspect if surveyed, the general public would have no idea that during the 1918 pandemic, only 24% of the population got sick, and of those that did, 98% recovered.  This point was left out, probably because it reduces the power of the argument to act or face dire consequences-it gives individuals the excuse not to act they were hoping for (I probably won't get it).  What that really succeeded in doing, was creating expectations for pandemics to feel vastly different than they do.  So many of the population looked up, rationalized their threat, and have now looked away-vowing never to be tricked into feeling so horribly scared by news of a pandemic again.  We are currently experiencing life in a pandemic.  This is probably pretty close to what the initial days of the 1918 pandemic felt like as well.  We actually are really good at pushing awareness of deaths out of our consciousness, we have learned to ignore the yearly toll of the seasonal flu, and a good number of people have already learned how to ignore the additional deaths from pandemic.  That would have been true in 1918.  This isn't that far off from what it would have felt like, not what the population and news media expected: instant horror.
5. It makes counter productive backlash easy to happen. The entire point of advocating preparing for a Pandemic is to keep it from happening.  If the dire outcome does happen, it means all efforts failed-and if it doesn't happen, when faced with the general populations inaction, the assumption then is that clearly outside factors led to the change in fate-not preparedness efforts.
6. Ultimately, the ‘horrible outcome' has always been beside the point. The risk of a horrible outcome is a reason to prepare-just one of them, and a counter productive one. Human nature is such, that by evoking the threat, it became easier to focus on the existence of the threat than any other message provided-but knowing that the threat exist does nothing at all to help and quite a lot to hurt when the threat is played out.   The actions needed to reduce a pandemics progress will lead to increases in over-all health,  productivity, resilience for other disasters-they solve a lot of problems for the population, potentially avoiding a dire consequence is just one of the benefits.  The existence of potentially dire outcomes shouldn't be swept under the table or distracted away from, it should simply not be the point that is repeated most frequently and definitely not used as an emotional lever.