A Behavioral Study of Public Health Messaging: Community, Self-interest, Vulnerability & Racial Bias

Overview

Finding the most effective ways to motivate people to take science-backed public health measures is critical. I wanted to see if messages encouraging people to protect others are more effective than messages encouraging people to protect themselves, and also whether other-oriented messaging is more effective when focused on the whole community or on particularly vulnerable people. I also wanted to investigate whether the race of vulnerable people featured in public health messages affects people’s actions. I displayed KN95 masks outside a store and then rotated different messages encouraging people to take an upgraded mask. For each message, I observed how many people walked by the sign and how many took a mask. Based on my observations (N=1460), community messaging was most effective in persuading people to take a mask, more effective than self-protection (χ2=4.1143, p=.0425) or vulnerability (χ2=12.5462, p=.0004). Although the vulnerability messaging was other-oriented, it was statistically indistinguishable from the self-protection and control messaging. For messages featuring a vulnerable person, the data unfortunately confirmed my hypothesis that people would be more likely to take a mask if the sign showed an elderly white person rather than an elderly Black person. Moreover, people were even less likely to take a mask if the sign showed an elderly Asian person. These results were also statistically significant. In a follow-up Qualtrics survey (N=2090), people likewise expressed higher willingness to receive a COVID-19 booster if the featured vulnerable person was white than Asian (p=<.0001). IOWA

Competition history

• JSHS 2023 Category not listed

Resources

• National JSHS abstract book ↗

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