The Wrong Message Can Mess Up Lives

Living in an incredibly divided country, where people hold opinions about how life should be lived that are so strong they won’t hesitate to cut ties with another person for holding an opposing view, I’ve been thinking about the role public messaging plays in the public’s decision-making. Certainly, the reasoning behind an individual’s decision-making stems from a combination of factors, including their personal wants and needs, the desire to fit in socially by doing what they believe will make them the most accepted by their peers, and what people in their inner social circle are doing and advising them to do. But what weight do messages from authority figures even carry these days? We’re living in a time when trust of authority has been eroded, and when people who don’t want to believe what an authority figure tells them can easily find something on the internet that “supports” their false view and believe that as reality instead.

Public messaging can work when it’s clear and unwavering, or has been enacted and upheld as law. For instance, I remember the “Just Say No” anti-drug campaign having a strong presence in classrooms when I was in elementary school. I don’t remember anyone questioning the message of “don’t do drugs,” and my generation seemed to grow up with, at the very least, a sense of caution when it came to illegal drugs. Jumping ahead to a present-day example, if an individual is in massive debt and tries to get a loan, they’ll likely be denied as a result of policies in place at the lender, effectively being saved from ruining their financial life further thanks to established rules and regulations.

Without the factors of clarity and consistency, or legality, a public message loses its impact. And when it comes to matters of physical or financial health, the lack of a strong and widely-accepted message – which often leads people to instead accept the wrong message from invalid sources – can destroy lives.

In my opinion, the best example of a public messaging failure that has led to the destruction of lives has taken place during COVID-19 pandemic. First, in the early days of the pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told the public not to seek out and wear face masks, leading them to believe they were not effective in controlling the spread of the coronavirus. In reality, masks (not flimsy cloth masks, but well-fitting, high-filtration masks) did and still do help prevent infection, but people were told not to wear them because of fears they would hoard them away from health care workers, who needed them the most at the time. This lack of transparency was the first link to crack in a long, broken chain of trust that now sits between the public and the CDC. The agency has continued to break the public’s trust by failing to clearly communicate early in the pandemic that COVID is airborne, and by telling vaccinated people in May 2021 that they could stop wearing masks without warning them that future virus mutations could change that recommendation. Last winter during the Omicron surge, the CDC shortened the isolation time for infected people from 10 days to five days, failing to clearly state that while people can still spread COVID after five days, the decision was being made to allow infected workers to return to work earlier to prevent the health care system and economy from collapsing, and that the recommendation should not apply to those who have the ability to isolate for 10 days.

The current, widely-believed narrative around COVID is: “The pandemic is over” (thanks to a very poorly thought-out comment made by President Biden during a recent interview), “just get up to date on your vaccines, and if you get infected, it’ll be mild. Everyone is back to the office, back to in-person conferences and back to traveling without masks, so why don’t you join them?”

Perhaps most alarming of all, the public is not being adequately warned about long COVID. According to the CDC itself, about one in five people who are infected with COVID – including mild and asymptomatic infections – develop long COVID, which can in some cases leave previously healthy people bedridden most of the time. In an Oct. 24 San Francisco Chronicle op-ed, Charlie McCone, who contracted COVID at age 30 in 2020 and has suffered severe symptoms ever since, asked, “Doesn’t the public deserve to be warned that this can happen to anyone?” Yes, they sure do, but I’m not sure many people agree with Charlie and me.

What if the current, widely-believed narrative around COVID was instead something along the lines of: “It’s important to be up to date on your vaccines because they are very effective in preventing hospitalization and death. But you can still catch COVID while vaccinated, and any COVID infection can lead to long COVID. Until better vaccines and treatments are available, the best way to prevent an infection is to wear high-quality respiratory protection around others.” More people may have continued to take precautions, preventing some of the death and disability the pandemic continues to inflict every day, and changing the reality of indefinite isolation that many immunocompromised and elderly people are currently living with thanks to most COVID precaution measures such as mask mandates having been dropped in public spaces.

Moving on to an example of how poor messaging can lead to a breakdown in financial health, the popularity of Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) services appears to be doing more harm than good, particularly for Gen Z. As reported in an Oct. 29 Bloomberg article, young consumers with little credit history have been enticed by BNPL’s promise of no-interest payments, and as a result spent thousands of dollars at retailers on credit that they could not repay. According to the article, one 24-year-old, who was paying her way through college and had been rejected by credit card providers, used BNPL services to spend $1,500 over 18 months and saw three of her unpaid loans be sent to collections. She was forced to turn to her parents for help, and it took her two years to rebuild her savings and begin paying down her student loans.

It’s hard to pin the blame on one party for a financial predicament such as this one; a lack of financial guidance from family and educators likely played a role in this 24-year-old’s decision to take actions that led her into debt. But the BNPL service providers that convinced her to take these actions had an obligation to clearly state the terms of the loan service so she could make a fully informed decision. And even if they did that by posting the required disclosures, it wasn’t enough to prevent her and other BNPL users from falling into debt.

Credit unions are beginning to enter the BNPL space, with BNPL services provider equipifi recently integrating with credit union digital banking platform provider Q2 and card processing CUSO Member Access Processing. Credit unions whose members will have access to BNPL as a result of these integrations must consider how they can teach them to use the service safely – because for many of them, the authority figures that have been in their lives until now have failed to send them the right message about money management.

As authority figures in their communities, especially on financial health (which, by the way, is connected to physical health, with physical health having a direct impact on one’s ability to work and make money), credit unions have an opportunity to send the right messages to those who are willing to listen. This requires building trust with their audience, and sending the message through the channels their audience is most likely to be using.

All of this is not to say that credit unions have an obligation to start sending a new message on COVID, or to completely solve the problem of debt accumulation among young consumers. But as authority figures that can influence financial and other major life decisions for their members and employees, it’s worth considering how powerful a message can be. A transparent one from a trusted authority figure can make lives, while an irresponsible one – or lack of one altogether – can destroy them.

Natasha Chilingerian is executive editor for CU Times. She can be reached at nchilingerian@cutimes.com.