It is still the case that we can educate a population and they may fail to change their behavior. We can even succeed at motivating a population and they may still fail to change their behavior. But I believe that by thinking more clearly about these discrete subtasks within the overall educational process we can start to make some concrete headway. Education occurs when clear, simple messages are repeated often in many different venues. The communication challenges at this stage are to develop those clear, simple messages, and to ensure that the messages reach members of the audience with sufficient frequency and from a sufficient number of credible sources.
Motivation occurs when the perceived benefits of a behavior clearly outweigh the perceived costs.
There are always costs associated with behavior change and sometimes there are benefits. Our challenge is to communicate about the behavior such that the perceived benefits are clearly understood to outweigh the perceived costs. Behavior change is more likely to occur with education, motivation, and ability. By ability, I mean the acquisition of the skills cognitive, physical, and social that a person needs to make a particular behavior change. This will be a great challenge when the goal is getting people to come to emergency departments as soon as they recognize they are having a stroke.