Fear, Sex, and Pandemic Part 5

(photo credit: Sarah G)

To encourage the adoption of steps to reduce a pandemic, pandemic preparedness advocates worked to make the threat feel vivid and real. If you've never read the studies pointing out that people work really hard to avoid taking risk seriously, it seems like the best way to encourage people to adopt actions to reduce a threat is by pointing out the threat.  This doesn't work, of course.  When people have read all of the studies, they often then decide that they need to change their focus-work to make the threat feel more vivid, more real-bring the threat home.  The combination of these methods not only didn't work, but they are the cause for the counter productive response to the emergence of the current pandemic.

Just because people weren't responding, doesn't mean they weren't paying attention. Pandemic Preparedness advocates intend to provide a one two punch, first a vivid description of what can go wrong if we don't act, and then information on what actions are needed.  Most of the population doesn't get that far though, (human nature wins) so the majority of the population simply received multiple descriptions of just how bad things will be.  This set up the situation we saw at the beginning of the H1N1 pandemic.