Management Department, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6370, USA.
Psychol Sci. 2011 Dec;22(12):1494-9. doi: 10.1177/0956797611419172. Epub 2011 Nov 10.
Diseases often spread in hospitals because health care professionals fail to wash their hands. Research suggests that to increase health and safety behaviors, it is important to highlight the personal consequences for the actor. However, because people (and health care professionals in particular) tend to be overconfident about personal immunity, the most effective messages about hand hygiene may be those that highlight its consequences for other people. In two field experiments in a hospital, we compared the effectiveness of signs about hand hygiene that emphasized personal safety ("Hand hygiene prevents you from catching diseases") or patient safety ("Hand hygiene prevents patients from catching diseases"). We assessed hand hygiene by measuring the amount of soap and hand-sanitizing gel used from dispensers (Experiment 1) and conducting covert, independent observations of health care professionals' hand-hygiene behaviors (Experiment 2). Results showed that changing a single word in messages motivated meaningful changes in behavior: The hand hygiene of health care professionals increased significantly when they were reminded of the implications for patients but not when they were reminded of the implications for themselves.
疾病常在医院传播，因为医护人员未能洗手。研究表明，为了提高健康和安全行为，强调行为者的个人后果很重要。然而，由于人们（尤其是医护人员）往往对个人免疫力过于自信，因此关于手部卫生的最有效信息可能是那些强调其对他人的后果的信息。在医院的两项现场实验中，我们比较了强调个人安全的手部卫生标志（“手部卫生可防止您感染疾病”）和强调患者安全的标志（“手部卫生可防止患者感染疾病”）的效果。我们通过测量从分配器使用的肥皂和手部消毒凝胶的量来评估手部卫生（实验 1），并对医护人员的手部卫生行为进行隐蔽、独立的观察（实验 2）。结果表明，消息中仅更改一个单词就能促使行为发生有意义的变化：当医护人员被提醒对患者的影响时，他们的手部卫生明显增加，但当他们被提醒对自己的影响时，手部卫生并没有增加。
