COVID-19 safety guidelines can only do their job if people trust them. If people find themselves pondering about the base of those guidelines, they are likely to distrust them and start thinking about withdrawing from collective efforts to stop the spread of COVID-19. Scientists in Canada and the United States found that frequent changes in safety guidelines caused people to judge experts negatively.
Science is always moving, especially when it comes to such relatively new problems as COVID-19. This disease has been around only since late 2019, which means that while there are hundreds and thousands of studies related to it, our understanding about COVID-19 is likely to keep changing. This inevitably changes the public safety guidelines as well, which make some people judge experts differently.
Participants in Canada and the United States completed an online survey about the trustworthiness of public health officials and scientists during the COVID pandemic. Before they had the opportunity to complete the survey participants were reminded of ways in which public health guidance on COVID were stable and which evolved and changed over time. As predicted, this study showed that frequent changes in safety guidelines caused people to judge experts negatively. When participants were reminded that some guidelines changed, they rated experts as having less expertise. Of course, this is not great, because people are unlikely to follow basic public health measures if they do not think they are coming from competent people. However, scientists have an antidote for that.
Scientists found that when people are reminded about the fact that science always changes and that change is good, they are more likely to accept that guidelines are going to change as well. Guidelines cannot remain the same forever, new information causes progress and our situation is always evolving. Jeremy Gretton, lead author of the study, said: “We found that this intervention helped make people more receptive to changes in guidance. For example, without forewarning, reminders of changing (as opposed to consistent) guidance led public health authorities to be seen as less trustworthy, but the forewarning message eliminated this negative effect”. This information, of course, should be used by specialists creating and managing public information campaigns.
Guidelines are going to continue to change, because COVID-19 situation is changing. We just need to accept that this problem is very new and our understanding will evolve with time. Just that information campaigns should be focused on informing rather than convincing. People don’t want to be convinced – they just want to know what is going on.
Source: University of Waterloo
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