Sense and Sustainability
How COVID-19 misinformation campaigns teach us lessons about communicating sustainability and climate change
If one more person sends me a forwarded message about 5G towers and COVID-19, I’ll move to the woods and live off the grid.
We’ve all been grappling with the flood of misinformation surrounding the pandemic, adding to the constant state of uncertainty that has marked the first quarter of the new decade. It’s become such an entrenched problem that the UN Secretary-General has called it ‘an enemy’ that needs to be overcome if countries are to arrest this pandemic.
Why are these misinformation campaigns everywhere? I believe it’s because they tap into our deep-rooted internal mechanisms of ‘sense-making.’ Weick et al (2005) describe it as “…involves the ongoing retrospective development of plausible images that rationalize what people are doing…Situations, organizations, and environments are talked into existence.” In other words, it’s how we as people make meaning out of ambiguity and the unknown, based on our experiences, communities, environment and so on.
What’s the story?
Sense-making revolves around two main things: what’s the story here and what do I do now. How we construct the story is based on a couple of things according to Weick et al: The need to organise a flood of information coming in; labelling and putting things into compartments that make sense to us; jumps and skips over to presumption; and our social setting and interactions. Especially now when we are bombarded by news, updates, headlines about the pandemic, who can be blamed for looking for a quick way to organise the chaos in their head. Like any other human endeavour, we find it easiest to default to comfortable scenarios in our head, or scenarios that are drilled into us by family experience, culture or even political affiliation.
How do I share the story?
After we’ve come up with the story, we need action and consensus to cement the idea into our new reality. These actions reinforce our new world view or, in some cases, allow us to edit some of our assumptions. We then talk this world view into existence through communicating these ideas to one another which then reinforces our foundation of ideas. So the WhatsApp forwards, among others, are the vehicle for the proliferation of these worldviews around COVID-19 that have been sense-made by people looking for answers. By sharing and finding this community of like-minded people (even if the information being shared is inherently wrong), we feel a sense of ‘rightness’ and that we’ve played an active part in communicating what made sense to us.
Is it accurate or plausible?
So as you grab your phone and shout that your friend needs to stop sharing bad science, we get to the big ‘whodunnit’ of the sense-making discussion: It’s not about accuracy — it’s about plausibility. A plausible story feeds into current political, social, cultural climates and provides a ‘good fit’ for people’s further extrapolation of a story. If it sounds good — it probably is for most people. Accuracy is important for many of us out there, based on good science, tested realities and analyses. However, many people’s experiences and perspective do not depend on this same level of scientific rigour — maybe we come at it at too high a level, or they just don’t have the time to sift through the science to make a measured understanding. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, they’re probably not going to assume it’s Russian misinformation.
Too often I think us sustainability practitioners are chained by the need to be accurate…maybe it’s a holdover from a particularly strict lecturer at University or a bad grade on a research paper that scarred us for life. But what matters are the stories and how these stories make sense to the people who matter.
A recent paper by Van der Linden et al (2020), looking at how communities find meaning in the face of climate change, echoed these sentiments. Through their transdisciplinary work, they found that: plausible stories around climate change impacts that embrace ambiguity are often more important than science-based, accurate stories (so often favoured by non-profits like mine); stories MUST make sense and connect to the local history, political economy and culture of communities — transplanted stories do not work, and well put together stories can connect communities and result in broader action.
A Misinformation vaccination
Earlier research by Van der Linden et al (2017) around climate misinformation can also retroactively play a role in coronavirus misinformation: we can actually ‘vaccinate’ against misinformation by taking the lead and concurrently putting the good scientific information out into the public, while simultaneously letting them know that misinformation will be coming to undermine the correct information for a variety of reasons: economic and political gain or just mischief-making.
Sustainability and climate change are broad, vague and ambiguous topics that seem, for most people, academic terms that are too big to overlay on their daily lives. The COVID-19 pandemic is the same — an idea/phenomenon that almost seems too unreal to be playing out in real life. So we tell stories to make it bearable and to make sense of it. However, as we know, not all stories are created equal.
This is a learning curve for all of us, from the stay at home parent to governments and everyone in between. We need to learn as much as we can and tell the stories about the existential threats of this century and make sure those stories count.
