Practise social distancing - how nouns kill people

Right now, your social media feeds are probably full of images of people congregating in parks, swarming all over beauty spots, and coughing coronavirus all over each other. The images usually come with urgent pleas to practise social distancing.

For my non-UK friends. Practising social distancing is the formulation that our government is using to describe what we all need to do flatten the curve of coronavirus infections – stay at home, only go out to buy food or medicine, and stay away from other people.

It’s a strange choice of words. It’s like the worst communicators in government and business came together and designed the most ineffective message they possibly could.

Words matter. They affect how people will behave over the coming weeks. And how people behave affects how many people will die.

This image, circulating for a few days now, illustrates the problems with social distancing perfectly. I’d add that social distancing isn’t just unclear; it’s also inaccurate. Physical distancing is what we need. We’re inventing new ways of staying social – getting drunk together on Zoom, mainly – and that’s a good thing.

But the failure of the social distancing message illustrates another interesting quirk of language – turning verbs into nouns reduces emotion. We call it nominalisation.

In a study published in Psychological Science, Michal Reifen-Tagar and Orly Idan showed how the use of nouns and verbs affects emotional response. They presented 129 Jewish-Israeli students with statements about hypothetical Israeli policies. Half of the students got the statements in noun form: I support the division of Jerusalem. Half of the students got the statements in verb form: I support dividing Jerusalem. The students expressed both their support for such a policy and the level of anger they would feel towards an administration which implemented it. They found that the students felt significantly higher anger and lower support when the sentence was presented in verb form. Intuitively, you can probably feel why this is so. The noun form feels abstract, conceptual, like a hypothetical idea – it has a more calming effect. The verb form feels more like a thing that we’re going to do – it arouses emotions.

Back to social distancing. This is a noun phrase. And, as the British government struggles to get people to stay at home, clunky nouns like this are not much use. They’re not good at driving action. As long as people are safe in the hypothetical fog, their behaviour won’t change. Stay at home is a verb phrase. It clears the hypothetical fog. You can feel the emotional effect. And it’s a clear prescription of a course of action. This is much more useful.