Department of Sociology, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, United States of America.
Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2023 Apr 14;18(4):e0284354. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0284354. eCollection 2023.
Effectively addressing public health crises like the COVID-19 pandemic requires persuading the mass public to change their behavior in significant ways. Many efforts to encourage behavior change-such as public service announcements, social media posts, and billboards-involve short, persuasive appeals, yet the effectiveness of these messages is unclear. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, we tested whether short messages could increase intentions to comply with public health guidelines. To identify promising messages, we conducted two pretests (n = 1,596) in which participants rated the persuasiveness of 56 unique messages: 31 based on the persuasion and social influence literatures and 25 drawn from a pool of crowdsourced messages generated by online respondents. The four top-rated messages emphasized: (1) civic responsibility to reciprocate the sacrifices of health care workers, (2) caring for the elderly and vulnerable, (3) a specific, sympathetic victim, and (4) limited health care system capacity. We then conducted three well-powered, pre-registered experiments (total n = 3,719) testing whether these four top-rated messages, and a standard public health message based on language from the CDC, increased intentions to comply with public health guidelines, such as masking in public spaces. In Study 1, we found the four messages and the standard public health message significantly outperformed a null control. In Studies 2 and 3, we compared the effects of persuasive messages to the standard public health message, finding that none consistently out-performed the standard message. This is in line with other research showing minimal persuasive effects of short messages after the very early stages of the pandemic. Across our studies, we found that (1) short messages can increase intentions to comply with public health guidelines, but (2) short messages featuring persuasive techniques from the social science literature did not substantially outperform standard public health messages.
有效应对 COVID-19 等公共卫生危机需要说服广大公众在重大方面改变行为。许多旨在鼓励行为改变的努力——例如公益广告、社交媒体帖子和广告牌——都涉及简短的、有说服力的呼吁，但这些信息的有效性尚不清楚。在 COVID-19 大流行早期，我们测试了简短信息是否可以增加遵守公共卫生指南的意愿。为了确定有前途的信息，我们进行了两项预测试（n=1596），参与者对 56 条独特信息的说服力进行了评分：31 条基于说服和社会影响文献，25 条来自在线受访者生成的众筹信息库。排名前四的信息强调：（1）对医护人员牺牲的公民责任回报，（2）照顾老人和弱势群体，（3）具体的、有同情心的受害者，（4）有限的医疗保健系统能力。然后，我们进行了三项有充分力量的、预先注册的实验（总 n=3719），测试这四条排名最高的信息，以及一条基于疾病预防控制中心语言的标准公共卫生信息，是否增加了遵守公共卫生指南的意愿，例如在公共场所戴口罩。在研究 1 中，我们发现这四条信息和标准公共卫生信息都显著优于无效对照。在研究 2 和 3 中，我们比较了有说服力的信息与标准公共卫生信息的效果，发现没有一条信息始终优于标准信息。这与其他研究一致，即在大流行的早期阶段之后，简短信息的说服力影响很小。在我们的研究中，我们发现：（1）简短信息可以增加遵守公共卫生指南的意愿，但（2）采用社会科学文献中说服技巧的简短信息并没有在很大程度上优于标准公共卫生信息。
