Guglielmo Briscese is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Chicago Poverty Lab of the Harris School of Public Policy. He was previously head of employment and labor markets at the U.K. Behavioural Insights Team in Sydney and a senior economist at the NSW Australian state government.
In the absence of a viable coronavirus vaccine, policymakers are struggling to minimize infections while slowly reopening economies. In doing so, they have only one real weapon: the trust of their citizens.
Key to doing this are clear instructions and simple explanations about what is necessary regarding policies like social distancing and mask wearing.
The trouble, however, with a virus as new as this one, is that as we learn about how it behaves, we also gain new understanding about what rules and restrictions are most effective.
Breakthroughs in our understanding of the pandemic have already forced policymakers to backpedal on guidelines, or reverse themselves completely — hardly an ideal situation when lives depend on people following government advice.
Mismanaging people’s expectations will only make the management of the pandemic and the relaunch of the global economy even harder.
What we need then is a communication strategy based not on certainty, but around the idea of adaptability. Otherwise, the efforts of policymakers risk backfiring completely.
Think of the coronavirus pandemic as an unexpected storm. Imagine you are sailing along in clear weather on a mid-summer morning, when suddenly the wind picks up. It’s already too late to avoid the oncoming storm. The only thing you know is that what’s coming is unpredictable. You must be ready to adapt, to change your sails rapidly as the winds gust and blow and obstacles like reefs or floating debris looms ahead in the waves.
Unfortunately, our brains are not programmed for quick adaptation: It takes time for behavioral changes to become new habits, and it takes even longer to break old habits. As a result, we tend to dismiss new evidence and react negatively to change, even when these changes are necessary to our own survival.
An example of this comes from Italy, where the government more than once postponed the date when lockdown measures would be lifted. In an ongoing research project on a representative sample of the country’s population, we found that Italians grew more impatient and reported a much lower willingness to comply with the rules when they were told the lockdown would be extended for longer than they had originally anticipated.
That frustration and willingness to break the rules might seem irrational: Why would you defy measures that are meant to protect your life and the life of your loved ones because of inaccurate deadlines? Shouldn’t we all welcome a response strategy that adapts as the “wind and waves” change?
In a series of follow-up surveys administered as the government started to reopen parts of the economy, we found that Italians are, in fact, still rather cautious and not at all eager to resume most business activities.
The source of their frustration, then, wasn’t just an urgent desire to get out of lockdown, but also the failure of policymakers to clearly communicate how and why they were changing their strategy.
A similarly abrupt change of course from the World Health Organization and the U.K. government had widespread effects on the British public’s willingness to wear face masks.
Initially, the advice was that wearing a mask was not necessarily helpful, and that protective equipment should be kept for essential workers. That may have been helpful at the start of the epidemic, when masks were in short supply. But it has now made it difficult to convince the British people that mask-wearing is an effective way to prevent the spread of the virus.
Indeed, behavioral scientists have noted a significantly lower use of masks among Brits compared with Europeans.
On the other side of the Atlantic, politics has intruded into the public health discourse — offering a cautionary tale for the potential impact of mixed messages and the lack of trust in certain authorities. In the United States, mask-wearing and other basic health guidelines have become divisive issues that cleave along political lines.
In a recent survey, we found that Americans don’t see the lockdown through the lenses of the apparent trade-off between health and the economy, but rather based on their political beliefs. Republicans are more likely to want to reopen the economy as soon as possible, don’t want to wear a mask, and think that the media is exaggerating the situation.
These political disparities make it harder for individual states to implement behavioral change policies — such as wearing protective gear and maintaining social distance — that could actually speed up the reopening of the economy while saving lives at the same time.
People gather on terraces in Paris after the lockdown rules were eased this week | Bertrand Guay/AFP via Getty Images
No one knows what the next months have in store for Europe. A second wave of infections, followed by a reintroduction of lockdown measures, is a plausible scenario. It’s unclear to what degree citizens will be willing to comply.
The pandemic has turned us all into subjects of a global behavioral science experiment: If we behave collaboratively, we might have a chance of limiting the health and economic damage caused by the coronavirus.
But in democratic countries, evidence shows that these measures are only successful if citizens trust their institutions and perceive such policies as useful.
Whatever stormy weather lies ahead, policymakers would do well to learn from their mistakes, develop communication strategies for all the scenarios we might face — and use them to educate the public starting now.
Mismanaging people’s expectations will only make the management of the pandemic and the relaunch of the global economy even harder.