May 20, 2013 — Harvard Gazette: “Each day, an average of nine people are killed in the United States and more than 1,000 injured by drivers doing something other than driving….Jay Winsten, Frank Stanton Director of The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Center for Health Communication and associate dean for health communication, thinks it’s time to turn to a higher power: social norms….With legislation outlawing distracted driving tough to enforce and awareness campaigns showing limited results, Winsten and colleagues are planning an initiative to change social norms by enlisting Hollywood as a partner. Such a strategy has worked before….Winsten spearheaded a campaign that made ‘designated driver’ a household term, helping to shape a new social norm that the driver doesn’t drink….the new effort, operating in a dramatically different media environment, will have to forge a new path….But Hollywood will still provide part of the answer, he said….The traditional top-down model of a public health campaign is outdated, he said, because today knowledge is disseminated laterally among the public as much as vertically from traditional knowledge sources.”
Read the Harvard Gazette article by Alvin Powell
Center for Health Communication
