In the 1950s, thousands of people died annually and tens of thousands were paralyzed by polio. People celebrated and embraced the science that developed the vaccine that quickly eradicated that disease in the U.S. But COVID-19 has produced an entirely different public reaction and health policy experts are wrestling with understanding why. We’ve seen evidence… read more →
Our Strategies for Dealing with Opposition and Outrage in Public Participation (we really need to shorten that name) class describes the indicators that cause people to become angry and fearful. Knowing the causes lets you deal with the effects. It also explains the behaviors that people who work with the public successfully use to make… read more →
Zoom and any of the several other video conferencing platforms that we’re all are using these days has saved our bacon in the past year. I can’t imagine what life might have been like without these platforms. But, as we (in The Participation Company) can attest, Zoom fatigue is really real. We keep learning and… read more →
Understanding why people believe the things they believe is core to understanding the phenomenon of fake news and disinformation. And helping people become more information and media literate (think the Inform level of the IAP2 Spectrum) is core to public engagement and, frankly, the future of democracy. Knowing that it’s human nature to feel first… read more →
We’re watching what will turn out to be the costliest and most tragic risk communication failure in modern human history. I’m talking about communicating the probability and magnitude of risks that actually harm people but don’t bother them enough for them to do anything about. We’re setting new COVID-19 daily infection and death rates with… read more →
In the practical, objective, scientific method world of observation, testing and refined decision making that most of us are tied to, it is sometimes easy to dismiss the emotional elements as fluff, irrelevant, and to be avoided. But any objective reasoning, especially in the public sector, invariably requires an element of policy developed by deliberation… read more →
Beliefs are funny things. For instance I’ve always believed that ‘Eleanor’ by The Turtles is one of the finest lyrical masterpieces in Rock & Roll history, but most of my friends believe that I’m nuts. Clearly, I need new friends – ones with better judgement…but I digress. Three out of four people globally say they’ll… read more →
Realizing that everything that happens online is just going to be different, we need to understand what works better and under what circumstances. Read more
With due respect to the previous article and its suggestions for convincing people to mask up, most people don’t understand numbers very well. People who routinely work with numbers like numbers a lot, but for most other people, numbers need to be explained in context and with relevance. Data and facts, especially very large numbers… read more →
There’s an old saying that You do not need a parachute to skydive, you only need a parachute to skydive twice, which I think relates nicely to the face mask debate. Science says wearing face masks in public will prevent a lot of coronavirus illness and death and many of us take that advice to… read more →