Enlarge image
Recruiting role model Uncle Sam: Persuasive communication is rarely a great advertising campaign
Photo:
Francis Dean / Dean Pictures / IMAGO
This is for the desperate and for the doubting. For the worried and the angry. For the angry and the exhausted. For the resigned. For those who have already become almost cynical. For those who just want to leave. For those who fight anyway and for those who are no longer fighting. For those who suffer quietly, but also for those who suffer loudly, because both are okay. In general, it is a lot more okay than most people think because we are in an existential and widespread crisis. The majority of the personal behaviors that we see every day that upset, irritate, upset us are: coping. But coping is acceptable in most variants. Except when it endangers third parties.
This is why this is for all those affected by a pandemic who do not think of themselves first and who therefore now feel smeared or even betrayed. From the federal government, parts of the editorial media, radical opponents of vaccinations and radicalized lateral thinkers. But from day to day more and more from that part of the population who may not categorically reject the vaccination, may not deny Corona outright, but somehow behave that way. We all know them.
It seems there is hope in the form of a looming general vaccination requirement. Quotation from Olaf Scholz and the SPD: "We have to get out of the situation." I would like to dampen and fuel this hope at the same time. Personally, I think the compulsory vaccination is very problematic, but can hardly be avoided in the meantime. The many organizational failures, political dead ends and communication failures - this also includes the frequent assurances that there is no compulsory vaccination - seem to have made them necessary. However, compulsory vaccination is not an automatic general solution to the pandemic problem. In order for it to work as part of the solution at all, our active assistance is required, and the first step is to understand the vaccination requirement. Vaccination is not compulsory, that is,no one is strapped to a couch by the police and forcibly vaccinated.
In fact, the compulsory vaccination should primarily make it extremely uncomfortable in everyday life to remain unvaccinated. It also acts as a foundation for other rules that are legally stable: With a mandatory vaccination, Deutsche Bahn could more easily refuse unvaccinated people to travel, unvaccinated employees could be dismissed more easily, unvaccinated schoolgirls could be more easily excluded from lessons, and so on and so forth. Of course there will still be people who remain unvaccinated, we know that from current role models. Because there is already a compulsory vaccination in Germany: against measles. However, it only applies to children, so the angry demonstrations were kept within narrow limits.
But with compulsory vaccination it can actually be possible to achieve a sufficiently high vaccination quota.
And, above all, to quickly implement any further vaccinations against virus variants.
However, the compulsory vaccination will only be successful if the accompanying communication is based on the rules of persuasion.
Please what?
more on the subject
For reading and forwarding: Why should I get vaccinated? A column by Sascha Lobo
Persuasion can be translated as "the art of persuasion". Behind this is the recognition that people do not always just do what they are told, even when there is great pressure, for example when threats are issued or punishments are followed. Defiance is a creature we all know, and in its most extreme form it can even make you die rather than follow an instruction. Persuasion means that the compulsory vaccination is not simply sent out to everyone as an unadorned fax, but that the state first builds up the right forms of accompanying pressure.
Because persuasion involves making evasive action more difficult with foresight, politicians should address the problem of forged vaccination cards before mandatory vaccination is introduced.
Because the demand for it is likely to explode with the compulsory vaccination, and unfortunately the state has neglected to roll out a forgery-proof, digital vaccination documentation out of digitization sausage.
And so far there have been many thousands, if not tens of thousands, of forged vaccination cards.
According to the rules of persuasion, one would have to proceed as follows, necessarily accompanied by other measures, which I will return to in a moment:
For eight weeks, perhaps the first eight weeks of 2022, there is an amnesty for forged vaccination cards - impunity against the requirement to actually be vaccinated by medical officers on site
then the strictest punishment for forgery and the possession of forged vaccination cards, for example in the price category attempted manslaughter, after all you knowingly endanger others.
Appointed lawyers are supposed to come together in a constitutional manner
At the same time, comprehensive, digitally secured verification of vaccination cards.
It does not matter so much whether this check can really identify all forgeries, the fear of exposure is sufficient (the problem of false certificates can be encountered in a similar way)
In this way, compulsory vaccination could also lead to the actual vaccination more easily and not to an explosion of counterfeits. However, as already indicated, this form of pressure only works inadequately without three essential accompanying mechanisms, namely reward, face protection and persuasive communication.
The reward is the easiest to implement. With the compulsory vaccination a vaccination premium must come, 250 euros seem appropriate to me. However, it is only distributed for the booster vaccination and of course also paid out retrospectively so that those who have long since seen do not feel like they have been screwed up again. Assuming vaccination penetration of 90 percent of the population would result in disbursement costs of just under 20 billion euros, which is completely acceptable in view of the expected costs of an otherwise perpetual pandemic.
Face saving is a little more complicated. In order for people to be convinced of a position that was previously rejected, they need a reason for changing their behavior that does not take away their dignity. An ideal approach here would be the rapid approval of a so-called dead vaccine. It's a very long-known form of the vaccine that has made it possible for previous skeptics to say: I had my doubts about this newfangled mRNA stuff, but now there's something traditional, tried and tested, so I'm happy to help end the pandemic!
A well-functioning inactivated vaccine would therefore help enormously with compulsory vaccination, also because there is a kind of psychological break in persuasion: Once someone has been vaccinated, regardless of what, it may be much easier for the people concerned to receive vaccines that were previously heavily rejected in the next step accept. For example a Biontech product against the Omikron variant of the coronavirus. By the way, another approach to protecting face would be the compulsory vaccination itself: I didn't want to get vaccinated, but I have to now - this is a way out for those who are in anti-vaccine circles and find it difficult to break away from it without the hatred of their friends who are critical of the vaccination to draw on. The prerequisite for this, however, would be that the vaccination requirement is properly staged.And that depends essentially on the third point, persuasive communication.
advertisement
Sascha Lobo
Reality shock: ten lessons from the present
Published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch
Number of pages: 400 pages
Published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch
Number of pages: 400 pages
Buy for € 22.00
Time of price inquiry
12/01/2021 4:29 p.m.
No guarantee
Order from Amazon
Order from Thalia
Order from Weltbild
Product reviews are purely editorial and independent.
Via the so-called affiliate links above, we usually receive a commission from the dealer when making a purchase.
More information here
This is where the people mentioned above come into play, namely we who are vaccinated or who are just planning to, who in every respect are extremely fed up with the pandemic, the mismanagement around it, the repeated failure of the vaccination organization. Because persuasive communication is rarely a great advertising campaign and even more rarely a great advertising campaign by the federal government. If the persuasion does not succeed en masse, the compulsory vaccination is the basis for the largest and most effective victimization of the lateral thinkers, which will radiate to every even remotely doubting person: a guaranteed catastrophe.
The demonstrably most convincing communication, however, is the personal, direct, fact-based communication of credible victims, which appeals to the empathy of the other person. And because we are all severely affected, as it became clear at the beginning, we have to pull ourselves together again and convince the people around us of the vaccination. Someone - maybe the new traffic light government - should provide us with an argumentative toolkit, maybe a card with ten arguments, and a guide for a persuasive interview. Developed according to the tried and tested criteria of persuasion. Maybe even in the form of a smartphone-compatible website in 2022? And then it depends on us. And of course, whether you can get a vaccination even without a bureaucratic mega nerve, if you want it.But in Germany that is in God's hands alone.
