On the importance of working to convince rather than compel.
“A quarantine officer cannot just introduce restrictions and rely on the threat of military force to implement them; he must also seek to persuade people to adhere to those restrictions of their own volition.”
This passage is from Nights of Plague, the novel I am reading now, by Orhan Pamuk, one of Turkey’s most decorated contemporary writers. The novel is about the arrival of a plague to a religiously and culturally divided island in the Ottoman Empire in 1900. Nights of Plague contains much that is relevant for how we think about pandemics, the societies they strike, and the public health authorities tasked with addressing them. The passage above speaks to something that we arguably do not talk about enough in our conversations about how to encourage compliance with public health best practices in both normal times and in times of crisis: the value of persuasion. In the last Healthiest Goldfish, I wrote about the value of performance, about how the roles we play can help us to better support the health of the public. Persuasion is a natural extension of this conversation about how our public presentation can best serve our work. Some thoughts, then, on the importance of persuasion and the steps we can take to become more persuasive as a field.
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