Driving Social Distancing – Profoundly & Quickly Understanding the Mind of the Citizen to Create Actionable Instructions & Long-Term Archival Knowledge

Abstract

We present two studies on the mind of ordinary citizens regarding what instructions to give in order to drive social distancing. We take methods effectively used in the world of consumer research (Mind Genomics) to drive purchase of products and service, retooling them to drive social actions, and then emerge with specific recommendations about what to say, and to whom. Our results deal with what is important to the Canadian and to the US citizen (ages 18-80), revealing that there are different mindsets by country, and more profoundly, within people across countries. Our three mind-sets are MS1 – Tell me how to distance, MS – 2 Pandemic Onlookers, MS -3 Bow to authority. These mind-sets react to different messages. We apply the same technology to move beyond deep understanding to recommending specific messages. Key emergent findings are the importance of governmental action (military lockdown) and religious figures (clergy) as communicators. Key to our results is that the entire study of each country was started and competed in a period of three hours, with actionable recommendations after two additional hours, viz., a five-hour testing/learning cycle. The technology promises the ability to learn quickly through experimentation, then to scale the learning world-wide to provide general findings and granularity (by country, by age/gender, and by emergent mind-sets), and finally to pivot as we learn, refining answers and recommendations in a few days through 3-6 affordable, iterated experiments.

Keywords: COVID-19, social distancing