When governments really need to get an urgent message across to the whole of society, and take what might be very unpopular measures, it’s important to get it right.

The Behavioural Insights team in the UK have released data on testing they’ve done to see which posters are most effective at changing people’s hand-washing behaviour.

We at the Winton Centre do not work on changing people’s behaviour, but we are interested in how well the content of different messages gets across, and how that affects people’s understanding, worry, and ability to make decisions.

So, as the pandemic spreads across the globe and governments take different approaches to tackling it, we’ve spent the weekend collecting data from several countries.

At the end of last week we collected data from 700 people in each of the UK and US on how they were responding to the risk of the coronavirus, and their governments’ reactions.

Over the weekend, we’ve collected the same data from more countries: Australia, Mexico, Spain, Germany and Italy (with the same caveats about the sampling — see footnote).

The comparisons make fascinating reading. Perhaps the most striking thing is the similarities across countries (with Mexico as the most different), but there are also some subtle differences hidden in there…

All countries felt that their governments’ response in the past few weeks had not been firm enough — even Italy, which has had strict curtailment of social gatherings for at least 10 days before the survey and Spain, under lock-down for a week. Mexico, with the fewest restrictions at the moment, is most united that the response is definitely ‘not firm enough’.