## Listening to Social Silence

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**Canonical URL:** [Listening to Social Silence](https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2021/december/tett.pdf)

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### Role of culture in public policy and pandemic response
- The rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines in 2020 was a scientific triumph, but by 2021 vaccine distribution proved "lamentably—and dangerously—inequitable" and vaccine uptake was hampered by culture.  
- Cultural factors—"the web of half-acknowledged rituals, symbols, ideas, spatial patterns, and social affiliations"—can undermine technically sound responses (example: vaccine hesitancy in the United States).  
- Effective policymaking needs "lateral vision" that combines hard sciences (medical research, big data) with soft sciences (anthropology, behavioral science) to account for context and "social silences."

### How an anthropological lens changes outcomes
- Anthropological methods (immersive, bottom-up, comparative) reveal implicit cultural assumptions—"A fish cannot see water"—and expose "social silences" that technical models miss.  
- Examples where cultural insight would have improved outcomes:
  - Early Western complacency about epidemics and overconfidence in health systems could have been mitigated by studying other regions' experiences with SARS and Ebola.  
  - Mask policies: anthropologists note that masks act as psychological prompts and social signals; Western resistance to masking (example: early UK government stance and Boris Johnson shunning masks in public) reduced uptake and consistent messaging could have benefited from Asian experience.  
  - Ebola (2014): initial treatment centers had opaque walls and incomprehensible messaging; redesigning centers to be transparent and culturally sensitive increased compliance.

### Applying cultural insight beyond pandemics
- Climate change and green policy require culturally resonant messaging and empathy to win public support and avoid backlash.  
- Renewable energy resistance example: urban elites may view wind and solar as morally superior, but rural communities face local disamenities, loss of identity, and livelihood impacts; policy needs worm’s-eye empathy alongside top-down models.  
- Policymakers should blend medical, computer, economic, and financial science with social sciences to create policies that are technically sound and culturally attuned.

### Limits and practicalities of anthropology in policy
- Anthropology is primarily qualitative and insights can be hard to scale and to communicate.  
- The discipline is not a panacea; it has shortcomings, but ignoring cultural and environmental contexts leads to poorer outcomes: "if we ignore the cultural and environmental context of people’s lives, we all suffer."

### Key recommendations (policy implications)
- Incorporate cultural anthropology and behavioral science into policy design and communication strategies to improve uptake of public-health measures (vaccination, masking) and other reforms (climate policy, pensions).  
- Use community voices and local messengers, not only "elite" scientific spokespeople, to increase resonance and compliance.  
- Combine worm’s-eye (bottom-up, empathetic) and bird’s-eye (top-down, technical) perspectives to identify both the "noise" and the "silence" in societies and to build more effective, equitable policies.

*Gillian Tett, December 2021*

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_Source: https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2021/december/tett.pdf_