Community Trust in Translations of Official COVID-19 Communications in Australia

Abstract

How Does Trust Work in Behaviour-Change Communication?We start from a simple model.The aim of the communications we are considering is to change the behaviour (wear a mask, stay home, wash hands, get vaccinated) of a person who probably has no direct experience of the cause necessitating the change.Most of us have not seen a virus; we are not experts in virology or epidemiology; we cannot directly calculate the numbers of cases in our wider communities.Given receivers' positions of relative ignorance, they will only change their behaviour to the extent that they trust the veracity of the messages received.This is commonly expressed as "trust in science", but the mechanisms are rather more complicated.What kind of trust is this?It is not the loose trust that we invest in patterns that are familiar and thus predictable.We trust the sun will rise tomorrow, just as we might trust (or indeed distrust) members of our family because we have known them a long time, and this familiarity can help us predict a certain trustworthiness.For similar reasons of repetition and familiarity, we might choose to trust members of our own cultural and linguistic community, since we at least stand a chance of guessing when they are lying and when they are telling the truth.In healthcare situations involving language discordance, that kind of trust is sometimes invested in family members as go-betweens, in preference to professional interpreters (Greenhalgh et al. 2006;Hsieh et al. 2010).We might term this "thick trust" (adapting Hosking 2014, 46-49) because it usually involves cultivating interpersonal relationships that develop over time and on several levels.Trust in science, by contrast, is based on a position of relative unfamiliarity, on a degree of ignorance, as when one buys a used car without really knowing the state of its engine (hence the economics of asymmetric information, since Akerlof 1970).That is "thin trust", of the kind that might be invested in official translators or interpreters simply because they are qualified professionals.Since thin trust is more likely to be unidimensional, Niklas Luhmann (1968) describes it as a mechanism for reducing complexity: because science is difficult to follow, we reduce its complexity by trusting a person or an institution that purports to understand it and can explain it in simpler terms.This is then the kind of trust that may be invested in governments or health systems (Meyer et al. 2008) or in various institutionalised media (Park et al. 2020).Luhmann elsewhere recognises that this thin trust (Vertrauen in German) can be distinguished from predictive confidence (Zuversicht) and operates as "a solution for specific problems of risk" (1988, 95).It could always be misplaced; it is only active when error or betrayal is possible.Anthony Giddens (1990, 33) aptly notes that trust of this kind is always "in a certain sense blind trust".Healthcare messaging can involve thick trust, thin trust, a range of intermediary possibilities, and then degrees of distrust (cf.Hwahng et al. 2021).Yet trust is a particularly elusive object of knowledge.You can ask people about it (we will look at a few trust surveys), but to see how it actually works

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