Risk: the challenge of communication

Public health campaigns are designed to make the public aware of specific risks and to change collective behaviour in order to minimise those risks. These campaigns often use emotions, such as anxiety, fear and guilt, to foreground and attract public attention to the specific risk and the associated collective behavioural change needed to mitigate it. This approach has underpinned campaigns such as the UK's regular ‘don't drink and drive’ campaigns (The Telegraph, 2020) and was evident in the 1980s with the ‘don't die of ignorance’ HIV/AIDS campaign (Burgess, 2017). In Australia in July 2021, the federal government was criticised for using scare tactics when it released a COVID-19 awareness advert that showed a young women in a hospital bed fighting for breath (Wahliquist, 2021).

Achieving the right balance

Public messaging needs to achieve a balance between creating enough anxiety to engender desired changes in behaviour, but not so much that there are adverse reactions. Quigley (2005) examines the ways in which governments in the US and UK sought to manage one major risk, the so-called Millennium Bug: the danger that at midnight on 1 January 2000 computer systems would crash, as many used a two-digit system that would not be able to differentiate 2000 from 1900. Both governments engaged in public awareness campaigns, and these were so successful that by the end of 1998, the US government was seeking to reduce public anxiety and avoid panic reactions such as hoarding (Quigley, 2005, p. 288).

To communicate effectively, policy makers and health promoters need to convert their information about risks and how to mitigate them into messages that can be understood and acted on by their target audiences. The effectiveness of such messaging depends on how they are structured (the source) and the ways in which they are received and used by target audiences (the reception). Jetten and colleagues (2020) have considered the ways in which messages should be delivered. They argue that the purpose of risk communication should not be to punish or force individuals to comply with government diktats; rather, ‘The role of governments should be to support and enlist this public resilience’ (Jetten et al, 2020, p. 14).