“Do they even want to be communicated with, or are you actually annoying them?”

She’s a behavioural scientist and a fan of government communication based on evidence and democratic ethics. Meet Sharon.

Private photo.

5 January 2023

All over Europe, governments spend millions of Euros on campaigns and communication, impacting people’s lives and the public debate.

From the tiniest SoMe post to nation-scale, multichannel campaigns, governments reach out to people to inform, engage, and discuss.

But how many of these efforts are a good use of the taxpayers’ money? To what extent do they make people’s lives easier and our democracies better?

Sharon Rosenrauch leads a behavioural science unit in the Australian government. We met her online to talk about the impact of government communication in general and how her team helps her government communicate with citizens about a policy like the renewable energy transition or through a campaign.

Taking the time to understand people

In general, she and her colleagues start by researching and understanding the people that a policy is targeting.

- It won’t always be the whole population. If you’re looking to develop a policy, for example encouraging women to enter into the electrical engineering workforce field, in that case, you’re not necessarily targeting men. So, we start by researching the people that the policy is targeting.

Sometimes, she points out, policymakers make assumptions based on their reality of the world, and the reason that people aren’t engaging in a certain behaviour isn’t always the reason policymakers think it might be.

- For instance, you might be trying to get young people to sign up for a program, but you are experiencing low sign-up numbers. You assume the problem is low awareness. People just don’t know the program exists, you think. Therefore, what you need is a giant comms campaign to increase awareness, right?

A costly exercise

Well, not necessarily. Sharon and her colleagues encourage policy teams to engage with the people a policy is impacting, through interviews and surveys, before doing anything else.

- We might find that it isn’t awareness that is causing the low sign-up numbers, but actually, you’re targeting a relatively young population who access everything through their mobile device – and the website could be incredibly un-user friendly on a mobile device.

In that case, an intervention seeking to increase knowledge about the program through a communication campaign might lead to the opposite of the desired effect, she explains. That is, more people knowing about the program, more people using their phones to get more info, more people left frustrated and with a bad experience.

- That’s a really costly exercise that you’ve just done. It’s either done nothing, or it has had a boomerang effect, Sharon says.

Engaging with the target audience is the best way to work out their current levels of knowledge, capacity, reference, and how they want to be communicated with, she explains.

- Do they even want to be communicated with, or are you actually annoying them? Sometimes, it’s a minimal just in time communication that’s going to have the desired behavioural effect.

According to the Australian behavioural scientist, a lot of public communication campaigns do not take real-world behaviour into account. Instead, they’re based on the assumptions that people in government make without necessarily talking to the people who are ultimately going to be the recipients of the messages.

Social licencing in the green transition

Like many other countries, Australia is working to transform its energy supply systems to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in accordance with the Paris Agreement. For that purpose, Sharon and her team are particularly interested in researching a concept that emerged from the mining industry - social license.

Some might prefer looking at pictures of transmission lines rather than to be their neighbours... Photo: Matthew Henry/Unsplash

Essentially, Sharon explains, when applied to a energy transition, it refers to building and maintaining community support for renewable energy infrastructure projects, like hosting infrastructure on their land.

- We found through some of our research that local opposition is not driven by the things you’d think. People are generally very pro-renewables, but some infrastructure issues are poorly understood, for example some of the transmission lines that transport the renewable energy from where it’s generated to where it’s ultimately being used, she says.

- If that story hasn’t been told, or if the way it’s been told hasn’t been understood, it leaves a lot of room for people to come in with their alternative narratives. Sometimes, those narratives have vested interests, whether they’d be commercial or political in nature. And that’s where we see ambiguity and confusion escalate and trust decline, she argues.

But isn’t there a risk here of reducing legitimate democratic opposition to green transition projects to some stories that just haven’t been shared with the population yet?

- Well, this isn’t just our narrative. This is a narrative that is informed by the learned people in communities. I might not even call it ‘our’ narrative because it’s a predominantly global narrative based on consensus from scientists around the world. So, it comes from an evidence base.

That said, Sharon doesn’t see the criticism as a bad thing at all.

- You don’t want a population that has a blind fate in government. A healthy level of skepticism and questioning is an important part of a healthy democracy. Accountability is important when spending taxpayer dollars.

Citizen assemblies should be used with caution

In Europe, citizen assemblies and juries seem to be established more and more often to increase the engagement and commitment of local communities.

Citizens are more and more often directly involved in policy development and implementation. On this photo, however, they are just enjoying themselves on a street in Munich, Germany. Photo: Pixabay

But Sharon argues that we need to be mindful of how we use, operate and encourage those kinds of forums. It’s about 'showing healthy caution’, she says.

They can be empowering forums for people who wouldn’t otherwise have a voice. But sometimes, she warns, bringing a large group of people together can lead to more biased decision-making than providing more diverse opportunities for more people to provide feedback.

- Human beings, despite our suits and make up, are ultimately animals. We like to forget that. There is a level of psychological safety that comes from thinking or responding in the same way as your peers.

Social desirability and group think

Therefore, ensuring that there is a system in place to control some of those group-based biases is important. Social desirability bias is a big one, she points out. Generally, people will look to the perceived leader of a community to tell them how to behave. And, she argues, that that is perhaps not a very democratic decision-making forum.

There are ways to mitigate biases, though.

- The way that you do that [control the bias, ed.] is that you withhold the leader from expressing their views until the end. You encourage engagement from the quieter voices in the room, she says.

Another potential bias to arise in such forums is groupthink, which is essentially when a few voices start saying the same thing, and then all of a sudden, everyone thinks the same.

To avoid that, “red teams” can be activated inside the group where a few people have been told to express a dissenting view. The act of having to consider alternatives and think of appropriate rebuttals broadens people’s perspectives and asks them to consider the merits of their position.

- Finally, it is very important to make sure that governments aren’t giving people symbolic voice and a false belief that they have the possibility to influence decisions that have already been made. Transparency is key and should be a guiding principle in all public communications, Sharon says.

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