Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California, United States of America.
Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2022 Oct 25;17(10):e0276072. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0276072. eCollection 2022.
For information interventions to be effective, recipients must first engage with them. We show that engagement with repeated digital information interventions is shaped by subtle and strategically controllable signals of the information's value. In particular, recipients' expectations are shaped by signals from the "envelope" that surrounds a message in an information intervention. The envelope conveys clues about the message but does not reveal the message itself. When people expect the message to be valuable, delivering it in a consistent and recognizable envelope over time increases engagement relative to varying the envelope. Conversely, when people expect the message to be of little value, delivering it in a consistent and recognizable envelope decreases engagement relative to varying the envelope. We show this with two field experiments involving massive open online courses and one online survey experiment (all pre-registered, N = 439,150).
为了使信息干预措施有效，接收者必须首先与之互动。我们表明，对重复的数字信息干预措施的参与度受到信息价值的微妙且策略性可控信号的影响。具体来说，接收者的期望受到信息干预措施中信息“信封”的信号的影响。信封传递了有关消息的线索，但不会透露消息本身。当人们期望消息有价值时，随着时间的推移，以一致且可识别的信封传递消息会增加参与度，而不是改变信封。相反，当人们期望消息价值不大时，以一致且可识别的信封传递消息会降低参与度，而不是改变信封。我们通过两个涉及大规模在线公开课和一个在线调查实验的现场实验（全部预先注册，N=439150）证明了这一点。
