


Misinformation and lack of information have hounded economies throughout the world. From petty fake news exploding in family WhatsApp groups to shootings in a pizzeria, disinformation is everywhere. Even severe issue like heat waves has not been spared in this onslaught.
‘Half knowledge is worse than ignorance’, said Thomas B. Macaulay. Dr. Scott Hanson-Easey and colleagues at the University of Adelaide investigated how information should be communicated in consistency with the ‘lived experience’ of vulnerable communities. The study highlighted how circulated information on heatwaves in Australia was majorly useless and redundant.

Figure 1 & 2 shows the responses of the sample regarding the relevancy of available information. It can be observed that 54.12% people agree that the information is rarely new. Similarly, 75.5% people think that they have heard enough about it already. This is in agreement to the thinking of the authors. In fact, in both cases, the number of people who are neutral, i.e., cannot decide, are more than those who disagree with the statements. This shows that people are more inclined towards not giving a decision than disagreeing. This strongly indicates that they think the information is not essential. One last thing to be observed is that in both cases, the maximum number of people “agree” and not “strongly agree”. In contradiction with the finding of ‘extreme biasness’ which states that a respondent is more likely to give extreme answers compared to neutral or semi-neutral ones. This may be due to unbiased questions, or the respondents were diligent in their answers.From this study, we see there is a distinct need for viable data regarding environmental issues. This is because the consequences otherwise are extremely dire. Heatwaves have claimed over 17000 lives in India in the last 50 years.
However, this is just a direct consequence and there is a lot more to the story. Studies have found that heatwaves cause an increase in the crime rate. As the temperature rises, it causes more agitation and stress in people. In specific, people who are poor find it hard to deal with the scorching heat. This leads them to commit crimes in order to survive. Unfortunately, this also means that those who fail in doing so have to resort to extreme measures. Often under the pressure of maintaining a livelihood during heatwaves, poor people succumb to committing suicides rather than literally being burned alive.
This is backed up by findings which indicate that suicide rates increase with an increase in the temperature. If we add the number of deaths due to such causes to the ones caused directly due to heatwaves, the weight of the number is hard to bear.The problem with spreading information on heatwave in countries like Australia and India is that these events are commonplace in these countries. People experience these things on a daily basis and have thus gotten used to it. They do not give it much thought. Hence, they find any information regarding these pointless.
This psychology can be related to ‘retrievability bias’. According to this bias, people base their decisions on their ability to retrieve any specific information from their memories. For example, rabies kills about 59,000 people every year whereas tsunamis have caused about 227,000 deaths from 1998-2017 (which means about 11,450 deaths per year, assuming a tsunami every year). However, if asked, chances are that someone would say that tsunamis are a lot more dangerous than rabies. This is because it’s easy for a person to retrieve memories of tsunami killing people since it is such a big even, even though people die of rabies every day. Similarly, in countries like India and Australia, people downplay the effects of a heatwave since it is so commonplace. Hence the need for clear, concise and useful information is apparent, but what makes information useful? Researchers have come up with the concept of ‘Nudgeability’ to answer this question.
Nudgeability is the susceptibility to a nudge influence. It determines the willingness of a person to be influenced by nudges. According to Dr. Hanson-Easey, this is the inherent problem in the information provided on heatwaves. The nudgeability factor of this information is extremely low, specially towards the poor. This happens when the nudge is overt or too subtle. This is also possible when the information used to change behaviour is not new or necessary, which is the case in above situation. This often leads to the nudge backfiring.
Instead of effecting decision making, the person being nudged becomes angry or anxious. It acts like adding fuel to the fire since it is causing more stress in an already stressful situation, thus creating a vicious cycle. Though there is a bright side to this. Since the need for it has arose, there has been a lot of new information spreading about previously undiscussed topics. For example, on 12 July 2022, New York released a video informing people about how they should act if a nuclear war takes place. It shows the announcer standing in a virtual recreation of New York as she talks about the 3 steps people need to take. Although the mentioned steps are elementary and obvious, this is the first time that anyone has addressed this topic. As far as climate change is concerned, people are now trying different methods to get their point across. Humour seems to have taken the centre stage.
Research have shown that when serious topics such as climate change are conveyed through the medium of humour, it has a higher probability of affecting behaviour. This means that the nudgeability factor of such information is higher. Making jokes about such issues makes it easier for people to swallow the bitter pill of truth. With the advent of such new techniques and avenues, the hope to bring about change is still alive.
Let us try it!


In 1950s many Asian and African countries were getting independence. A race began between the two superpowers of that time, USSR, and America, to bring these newly independent countries under their influence. Both superpowers represented two different political and economic models. This race soon turned into a fierce competition to win the hearts and minds of the third world. The methods involved different kinds of propaganda, diplomacy, espionage, and other counter-intelligence tactics.
During 1950s, in Berlin, the hotspot of counterintelligence activities, one of CIA’s “experimental workshops” attempted to identify and analyze population attitudes and mental responses, to counter the extremely effective ‘active measure’ used by USSR’s counterintelligence service, the KGB. The experiments done by them demonstrated that “an indirect approach,” exemplified by the Lccassock’s (a psychological warfare project by CIA in West Germany) forays in astrology, gossip, rumor, and women’s magazines, worked best to get into the mind of people living in Eastern Bloc. Specifically, the effect of jazz was very evident. Schlagzeug, the most significant jazz magazine in Germany was funded by the CIA.
Bill Harvey, a CIA officer, also known as the ‘American James Bond in a memo said – “along with astrology, we consider [jazz] one of the most potent psychological forces available to the west for an attack on Moscow Communism.
The racism in American society was an easy target for propaganda by KGB. American relations with newly independent African countries became vulnerable to KGB’s active measures. Jazz became the most crucial part of America’s cultural diplomacy in Africa.In 1955, congressman Adam Clayton Powell, who had close ties with the jazz community convinced US leaders that jazz was the best way to intervene in the cold war culture conflict and could help counter KGB’s stories about American racism. Under a state sponsored program accomplished jazz artists like Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck became the first jazz ambassadors to be sent around on world tours by the United States State Department.

Same year Voice of America Radio began broadcasting jazz music into Soviet-controlled territories. For many people Willis Conover’s Jazz broadcasts were the only exposure to music from the West.
Racially mix jazz bands was also used to promote America’s image as an equal society in Africa and Asia. The idea was always the same for the Intelligence community: keep communist propaganda about US at bay by whatever means possible. A front-page story in the New York Times proclaimed America’s best cold war weapon was – “a blue note in a minor key”.
In 1958, 12 Jazz performances by Dave Brubeck in Poland, which was in Russia’s sphere, were some of the first in a long tour that would never stray far from the perimeter of the Soviet Union. They passed through Eastern Europe, the Middle East, central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. In Poland, audiences were used to more formal, Soviet-approved culture like ballet and opera. Early jazz had flourished in the country in the 1930s, but after the Soviet takeover following the end of the war, jazz was forbidden from the airwaves, believed inferior to the high arts that had government support. An underground scene resisted this repression; they tuned in, when they could, to “Jazz Hour,” a shortwave radio show broadcast by Voice of America. Brubeck’s performances — the first of any American jazz band behind the iron curtain — were an exceedingly rare opportunity for Poles to see jazz played live.
Thirty years after the concerts in Poland, in 1988, Dave Brubeck was invited to soundtrack nuclear disarmament talks between Reagan and Gorbachev, in Russia. “That really did work, in terms of breaking the ice between the delegations,” Darius Brubeck (son of Dave Brubeck) says. “It was something they could focus on, where they could just have some fun together and be human beings.” The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was signed soon afterwards, limiting the possibility of a catastrophic nuclear war breaking out.
The Jazz ambassador had an impact on domestic politics of United States as well. A film directed by Hugo Berkeley, called Jazz Ambassadors shows how in 1957, in protests against the Little Rock crisis, Louis Armstrong cancelled plans for a State Department tour through the Soviet Union. It was not until 1961, when the civil rights movement had made significant headway, that Armstrong changed his mind, and agreed to tour Africa.

A cool podcast to check out for those of you interested in this, is on a very promising and intriguing story did, or did not the CIA write the power ballad Winds of Change performed by Scorpions. The podcast is available in full on Spotify and is a recommended listen, so check it out here if you want.
