A small problem with awareness raising!

I used to work at a busy youth hostel. In that job I was required to communicate with a lot of people who did not have a good command of English. It could be a stressful struggling to communicate and I never quite stopped trying to speak louder to the person opposite me or to try to say the same thing in different ways.

One evening, my Japanese counterpart answered the phone. The caller from another hostel spoke fast in English and when he asked her to repeat it, she spoke increasingly louder until eventually my colleague finally handed me the phone. He didn’t need her to speak louder. He needed her to speak slower and to repeat exactly what she said so that he could put more of it together to understand it. Instead she phrased her request differently which only gave him more work to do to understand her.

My observations are that although this may be obvious, it is not easy to put into practice. The first thing that most of us do when we are not understood or not heard is to assume that we need only to speak louder and the problem will be solved. Alas, speaking louder can actually prevent your message going across at all in the wrong situation! It can be useful to speak loudly to a deaf person or to speak slowly to them. To someone who speaks a different language, slower will make a difference, louder won’t. In a crowd of noisy people, speaking may not be the best way to communicate although observations indicate that most of us just try to yell louder than everyone else. In a crowd of foreigners, it may be most effective to hire the services of a translator and to use a completely different language. It is often as effective to say less rather than more. As I found when I was teaching, better to get a small amount across well than to put lots across badly.

This seems all self evident and yet it is clear that people are great at filtering information before it gets anywhere near our brain if it is irrelevant or just perceived as noise. Rather unfortunately, that noise can stop the useful information getting through!

As Bickerstaff and Walker (2002: 2175) note, “there is now a myriad of awareness raising campaigns urging members of the public to take responsibility for improving their environment.” As they note, these campaigns have not been very successful. Such campaigns assume that people will passively soak up information and then become actively responsible for simple changing their own behaviour in line with that information. At best this is somewhat contradictory! At worst it misses completely the complexity even of making relatively simple changes.