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Psychologist Says Tailored Messaging Is Key For Effective Public Health Policy

For public health leaders, understanding different communication styles and preferences — and how people respond to them — is key to reducing the spread of the coronavirus.

Humans often don't behave logically. Their decisions don't always follow the evidence.

Those are among the ideas that Gaurav Suri considers in his work studying decision-making and motivation. He's an experimental psychologist and a computational neuroscientist at San Francisco State University.

Not surprisingly, choosing the right words matters a lot when it comes to public policy.

Something as basic as how public health officials talk about wearing a mask — for example, as "protection" instead of a "mandate," could make a difference, Suri says.

Here are excerpts from Suri's interview with All Things Considered.

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And yet this holiday season presents a grim reckoning. The United States has reached an appalling milestone: more than one million new coronavirus cases every week. Hospitals in some states are full to bursting. The number of deaths is rising and seems on track to easily surpass the 2,200-a-day average in the spring, when the pandemic was concentrated in the New York metropolitan area.

Our failure to protect ourselves has caught up to us.

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