Effects of Prosocial and Hope-Promoting Communication Strategies on COVID-19 Worry and Intentions for Risk-Reducing Behaviors and Vaccination: Experimental Study

Elizabeth Scharnetzki; Leo Waterston; Aaron M Scherer; Alistair Thorpe; Angela Fagerlin; Paul K J Han

doi:10.2196/41959

Effects of Prosocial and Hope-Promoting Communication Strategies on COVID-19 Worry and Intentions for Risk-Reducing Behaviors and Vaccination: Experimental Study

JMIR Form Res. 2023 Aug 1:7:e41959. doi: 10.2196/41959.

Authors

Elizabeth Scharnetzki¹, Leo Waterston¹, Aaron M Scherer², Alistair Thorpe³, Angela Fagerlin^{3

4}, Paul K J Han^{1

5

6}

Affiliations

¹ Center for Interdisciplinary Population and Health Research, MaineHealth Institute for Research, Portland, ME, United States.
² Department of Internal Medicine, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, United States.
³ Department of Population Health Sciences, University of Utah School of Medicine, Salt Lake City, UT, United States.
⁴ Salt Lake City VA Informatics Decision-Enhancement and Analytic Sciences Center for Innovation, University of Utah School of Medicine, Salk Lake City, UT, United States.
⁵ Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, MA, United States.
⁶ Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD, United States.

PMID: 37379364
PMCID: PMC10411423
DOI: 10.2196/41959

Abstract

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has engendered widespread fear and skepticism about recommended risk-reducing behaviors including vaccination. Health agencies are faced with the need to communicate to the public in ways that both provide reassurance and promote risk-reducing behaviors. Communication strategies that promote prosocial (PS) values and hope are being widely used; however, the existing research on the persuasiveness of these strategies has offered mixed evidence. There is also very little research examining the comparative effectiveness of PS and hope-promoting (HP) strategies.

Objective: The aim of this study is to evaluate the comparative effectiveness of PS and HP messages in reassuring the public and motivating COVID-19 risk-reducing behaviors.

Methods: A web-based factorial experiment was conducted in which a diverse sample of the US public was randomized to read messages which adapted existing COVID-19 information from a public website produced by a state government public health department to include alternative framing language: PS, HP, or no additional framing (control). Participants then completed surveys measuring COVID-19 worry and intentions for COVID-19 risk-reducing behaviors and vaccination.

Results: COVID-19 worry was unexpectedly higher in the HP than in the control and PS conditions. Intentions for COVID-19 risk-reducing behaviors did not differ between groups; however, intentions for COVID-19 vaccination were higher in the HP than in the control condition, and this effect was mediated by COVID-19 worry.

Conclusions: It appears that HP communication strategies may be more effective than PS strategies in motivating risk-reducing behaviors in some contexts but with the paradoxical cost of promoting worry.

Keywords: COVID-19; behavior; communication; effect; effectiveness; hope; messages; prosocial; public; risk; social; survey; vaccination; vaccine; web-based.

©Elizabeth Scharnetzki, Leo Waterston, Aaron M Scherer, Alistair Thorpe, Angela Fagerlin, Paul K J Han. Originally published in JMIR Formative Research (https://formative.jmir.org), 01.08.2023.

Abstract

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