School of Journalism & Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA.
Department of Communication, University of South Florida, USA.
Soc Sci Med. 2023 Sep;333:116132. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2023.116132. Epub 2023 Jul 29.
The spreading of COVID-19 misinformation paralleled increasing fear towards the pandemic reported worldwide in its early stages. Yet research on the emotional basis for misinformation susceptibility and how emotional appeals may help reduce COVID-19 related misperceptions remains limited. To address this gap, we conducted a 2 (threat from COVID-19: yes vs. no) × 4 (correction conditions: none vs. factual correction vs. factual correction + words of optimistic outlook & individual efficacy vs. factual correction + words of optimistic outlook & collective efficacy) between-participant factorial experiment among an online sample of Chinese residents (N = 836) in June 2020. Misinformation about COVID-19 treatments and mitigation was presented in all conditions. Across five misinformation topics, threat information induced more misperceptions while all three types of corrections mitigated threat information's deleterious impact and improved belief accuracy. Importantly, corrections incorporating hope appeals showed enhanced effectiveness in improving belief accuracy when threat information was present whereas factual corrections absent hope appeals did not show similar sensitivity towards threat information. For hope appeal corrections, their indirect effects on desirable downstream behavioral intentions through corrected beliefs were stronger with than without preceding threat information. Our study thus demonstrated the potential of deploying hope appeals to fight the COVID-19 infodemic in China and beyond when threat information is prevalent, while highlighting the importance of studying the roles of emotional appeals in health misperception formation and correction.
新冠病毒 19 型传播错误信息与全球在早期报道的对大流行的恐惧呈平行趋势。然而，关于错误信息易感性的情感基础以及情感诉求如何有助于减少与新冠病毒 19 型相关的误解的研究仍然有限。为了解决这一差距，我们在 2020 年 6 月在中国居民的在线样本中进行了一项 2（新冠病毒 19 型的威胁：是与否）×4（纠正条件：无 vs. 事实纠正 vs. 事实纠正+乐观前景和个人效能的词 vs. 事实纠正+乐观前景和集体效能的词）的参与者间因子实验。在所有条件下都呈现了关于新冠病毒 19 型治疗和缓解措施的错误信息。在五个错误信息主题中，威胁信息导致了更多的误解，而所有三种类型的纠正都减轻了威胁信息的有害影响，提高了信念的准确性。重要的是，当存在威胁信息时，包含希望诉求的纠正方法在提高信念准确性方面显示出了更强的效果，而没有希望诉求的事实纠正方法对威胁信息没有类似的敏感性。对于希望诉求的纠正方法，它们通过纠正后的信念对期望的下游行为意图的间接影响在存在威胁信息时比不存在威胁信息时更强。因此，我们的研究表明，当威胁信息普遍存在时，在中国和其他地方部署希望诉求来对抗新冠病毒 19 型信息疫情具有潜力，同时强调了研究情感诉求在健康误解形成和纠正中的作用的重要性。
