The title says it all ! Though it is not fashionable to write about any thing related to lectures given by some professors but incidentally, there happens to be some great lectures who teach us more than anything ever could. This one was given by Prof. Dinesh Mohan who is teaching the course Ergonomics. He belongs to TRIPP department which has been in news for BRT corridor concept.
The lecture was about educating the people to follow rules for safety. But we can use this concept in all the fields. When we know something, and want other people to understand it and follow the same, it becomes increasingly difficult. Whatever education, preaching, advertising we might be giving to influence others, it rarely has any positive effect on them. Instead, there are studies proving the negative influence of that education. Be it related to crossing the roads by 8 year olds, wearing the helmets, use of seat belt, other health related safety precautions, when we try to teach people about all these, it becomes fashion to be negligent about them. One example given was of U.S. students attempting more dangerous tricks with fireworks to influence their friends when it was certified that fireworks are dangerous to play with. Similar is the case with use of helmet or seat belt. When people were compared on the basis of received precaution message on T.V., there was no difference in usage of those precautions among people who received those messages and those who did not.
There is an interesting point about telling others what is right for them to do. If we do not speak them as equals, they do not listen to us and become more negligent. If we behave like we are more intelligent people having more knowledge, listeners do not like it. It becomes even more futile when the message given is not based on pure scientifically established facts but represented as just an ideological viewpoint. This issue raises the question of futility of all the advertisements that are done regularly on hoardings, print and electronic media trying to indicate just the superficial safety precautions but not the hard core scientific facts behind those precautions. We are continuously being told what we should do and what we should not. Unfortunately, it does not work that way. It is more than enough to tell that, from what happens what and why.
The other interesting point comes of enforcement of these precautionary habit among people by laws. The model we have adopted is to impose fine on people who do not follow these rules. But it is very evident that rules can not be imposed on all people with perfection and people start to find loopholes to get away without following them. Take the example of use of helmets. Apart from corruption, people prefer to buy a very low cost helmet which is enough to save them from a fine. But many brain injuries/deaths have occurred to people not using the right kind of helmet. Take the case of smoking. By policy, rules have been imposed on people to abstain them from smoking in the public place. But how many people do we see daily smoking in public places and how many of them are fined? If we blame it completely on the system, then we would be making a huge mistake as we have been doing till now. In the case of helmet, instead of just advertising that use of helmet is safe, we could spread awareness to the youth and their parents by depicting the real picture about the injuries that people are suffering with and those that could have been avoided with the use of helmet having necessary safety features. In the case of smoking, before imposing the law, we could have educated the public about the different fatal diseases and their occurrence among people who smoke, we could also educate the public who do not smoke about the effect of passive smoking on them, problems that is caused by smokers and are not their faults. This way, it could generate resistance not only among non-smokers to let smokers smoke in public places but also on smokers by their parents telling them ills of smoking. The whole community will then cooperate in implementing or correcting the law.
On the last words, the failures in implementing the laws do not reside with govt or people but on the ways by which we try to educate people.
