The coronavirus messaging disaster

How official communication has failed, and how it can succeed.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been getting a number of emails about the novel coronavirus. People have been particularly interested in how I would increase lockdown compliance and get people to social distance appropriately.

This is a great question, because I believe the current messaging strategy being employed (particularly in the US) is wildly ineffective.

Up until this point, the main message being distributed from federal and local officials has basically been:

Of course, the official messages are a bit more extensive, but this captures the basic info being repeated.

And I can’t think of a less effective way of ensuring that people gladly comply.

In fact, the messaging is only being presented in a way that will appeal to, at maximum, half of the population.

“But Jason, that sounds like a lot of people!”

Yes, it is. But in order for these measures to self-sustain, we need to take advantage of one of the most powerful psychological forces in existence: social pressure.

And in order to make sure that we’re able to maximally apply social pressure, we need more than half of the population to be on-board. We need people to really believe that they’re weird if they don’t follow along.

To do this, we realistically need 80+% of the population to comply, and the current messaging will not get us there.

So what will?

Simple.

A more psychologically diverse messaging blitz.

As I mentioned, current messaging efforts only appeal to those who are conscientious rule followers — those who are easily swayed by authority. “Follow the instructions of the CDC and local and state officials”.

However, conscientiousness is only one of the five major drivers of behavior.

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