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Abstract
How should health authorities communicate to motivate the public to comply with health advice during a prolonged health crisis such as a pandemic? During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, for example, people have had to comply with successive restrictions as the world faced multiple races between controlling new waves of the virus and the development and implementation of vaccines. Here, we examine how health authorities and governments most effectively motivate the public by focusing on a specific race: between the Alpha variant and the implementation of the first generation of COVID-19 vaccinations in the winter of 2021. Following prior research on crisis communication, we focus on appeals to fear and hope using communicative aids in the form of visualizations based on epidemiological modelling. Using a population-based experiment conducted in United States (N = 3,022), we demonstrate that a hope-oriented visual communication aid, depicting the competing effects on the epidemic curve of (1) a more infectious variant and (2) vaccinations, motivates public action more effectively than a fear-oriented visual communication, focusing exclusively on the threat of the new variant. The importance of the implementation of such hope-oriented messages is further highlighted by cross-national representative surveys from eight countries (N = 3,995), which demonstrate that feelings of fear towards the Alpha variant alone were insufficient to activate strong compliance. Overall, these findings provide general insights into the importance of hope as a health communication strategy during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.
Highlights
How should health authorities communicate to motivate the public to comply with health advice during a prolonged health crisis such as a pandemic? During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, for example, people have had to comply with successive restrictions as the world faced multiple races between controlling new waves of the virus and the development and implementation of vaccines
Analyses regression the other outcome measures on observed feelings of hope and fear, demonstrate that feelings of hope (b s = [.49; .58] ) predict these outcome measures substantatively and significantly stronger than feelings of fear (b s = [.13; .20]). These findings demonstrate that in a phase of the pandemic with significant fatigue, including the hope promised by the advent of vaccines into the communication of future scenarios was effective in motivating stronger adherence to health guidelines and facilitated a better public understanding of the pandemic situation that an exclusive focus on the threat from the new, more infectious variant
The present study investigated health communication in a critical phase of the COVID-19 pandemic that could be characterized as a race between controlling emerging infectious variants and implementing vaccinations
Summary
How should health authorities communicate to motivate the public to comply with health advice during a prolonged health crisis such as a pandemic? During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, for example, people have had to comply with successive restrictions as the world faced multiple races between controlling new waves of the virus and the development and implementation of vaccines. The importance of the implementation of such hopeoriented messages is further highlighted by cross-national representative surveys from eight countries ( N = 3, 995 ), which demonstrate that feelings of fear towards the Alpha variant alone were insufficient to activate strong compliance Overall, these findings provide general insights into the importance of hope as a health communication strategy during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. Classic work in the psychology of emotions argues that hope is an important precondition for overcoming difficult situations as hope motivates people to take action towards achieving their goals[7,23] This is consistent with theories of the psychological motivations underlying compliance with protective advice, which emphasize the dual importance of appraisals of threat and appraisals of abilities to cope with the threat[21]. Studies on crisis communication have investigated the relative importance of appeals to hope in relation to, for example, climate-related behavior and find that hope-oriented communication increases
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