Up one levelAdapted from her Facebook posts of 5/3/2020, written in response to an opening post asking for experiences of epidemiologists who have offered to respond to questions about COVID19 and seeking role models for responding gently and persuasively to misinformation.
Claire Hooker: Hi, my expertise is actually in risk communication (google 'Claire Hooker and The Conversation' and you can read a few articles; they're aimed at an Australian audience, and I would have written them slightly differently if they'd been intended for a more polarised context like the USA. Even better, check out my colleague Julie Leask's work. She's a world expert on countering anti-vaccination sentiment. Third place to go is Peter Sandman's website. He's a risk communications expert whose approach has stood the test of time).
I feel for you all so much - I get upset by both your open-the-state rallies and the appalling misinformation in the USA, without even living there. I also try to proactively communicate from the science of risk perception/risk communications perspective. Lots of people who've commented on this thread have said very wise things, and I can give you some evidence to support them.
First, trust is one of the strongest determinants of what people listen to. If people trust you, they will be willing to listen. There are three components to trust (basically): competence, honesty/integrity, and empathy. So your communicating carefully and openly about how the science works - including being honest and explicit about uncertainty - ticks off the first two, and being calm and respectful ticks off the third.
Second. If I were communicating in a polarised information context, my goal would not be to correct misinformation as such: my goal would be (a) to create common ground so that ongoing conversations and engagement are possible and (b) not to change the mind of someone espousing an utterly incorrect position, but to engage/influence the many, many people who don't really have a strong position or don't know what to think. The reason for this is that people never react well to being told they are wrong. Instead, they often react defensively and 'anchor' more firmly to their original position. They get 'outraged' - and the more 'outraged', the less they will be willing to listen. Actually, the more outraged they are, the less they CAN listen: literally; cognitive processing decreases (true!) and the use of cognitive heuristics and the many biases in cognition they produce increases (I'll write a little more on this below).
That's why your communication job is two-fold: one is to do the work of carefully and calmly explaining the science; two is to work at 'depolarising', that is, being calm and enabling calm and finding common concerns and language, to reduce the outrage. One good way of doing this is to name and directly address (with empathy) whatever the anxieties are that are driving their beliefs. The same process occurs in you and in them: you are anxious about the negative impacts of their beliefs, and that drives your outrage, which makes it harder for you to communicate effectively (it's upsetting and you get mad - imagine trying to interpret data that suggested a lower curve in an early-opened county in that state). So what you want is to flatten that anxiety-outrage process in them, so you can be heard. Words like 'The reason why I am more worried about deaths from COVID than from the mental health impacts of isolation are ...' can help you hold and defend that calm common ground. The experience of the person here [earlier in the Facebook thread] who's experience of having lots of people from both the red and the blue team feeling very grateful that they can ask her questions, may well be yours.
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Claire Hooker: I know I'm writing at length - thanks for your tolerance. I wanted to add two things. The first is to say "thank you." It's exhausting and so important to go on providing good information in this context, to keep steadily providing clear explanations of the science. The majority of people really want this, provided dispassionately. Secondly, I personally find it really helpful to understand the cognitive mechanisms that drive polarisation. They're very powerful. Dan Kahan's research and writing in this area is super helpful. You can get a lot of links from 'cultural cognition' in Wikipedia or through Kahan's website via Yale, but this paper sets it out really clearly. Here's to power to your voice. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1123807, Cultural Cognition as a Conception of the Cultural Theory of Risk by Dan M. Kahan.
Claire Hooker: BTW: 2-minute video on why 'herd immunity' is NOT the same as 'let it rip' and why 'let it rip' won't 'work' (by public health doctor very much trusted in Oz, but won't be either known or trusted in the USA. Still, it's a nice clear explanation. (video link: https://twitter.com/i/status/1249954289193230337).