Driving Public Compliance with the Health Policy of Social Distancing: The Case of the COVID-19 Pandemic in India

Abstract

The paper presents a new approach to understand the mind of the person in order to drive desired action in crisis situation, specifically the COVID-19 pandemic. Respondents evaluated systematically varied, unique sets of 24 combinations comprising communication messages addressing four aspects about social distancing: the perceived risk, the specific action desired, the compliance policy, and the agent of the information, respectively. The rating was the degree to which the combination was believed to ‘describe the respondent,’ a way of describing disagree/agree in a colloquial fashion. The analysis revealed the degree to which each message drives each of the four desired calls to action for social distancing. The approach provides a rapid, scalable cost-effective, and iterative capability to identify what to say to the public and how to say it. The application for social distancing was designed, executed, and competed in a three-hour period, with specific direction about what must be done, and the capability of pivoting to further improve the specific recommendation regarding social distancing and COVID-19 pandemic.

Keywords: COVID-19, social distance, Mind Genomics, conjoint analysis, mindsets