Abstract
The rapid spread of COVID-19 has emphasized the need for effective health communications to coordinate individual behavior and mitigate disease transmission. Facing a pandemic, individuals may be driven to adopt public health recommendations based on both self-interested desires to protect oneself and prosocial desires to protect others. Although messages can be framed around either, existing research from the social sciences has offered mixed evidence regarding their relative efficacy. Informing this dialogue, in the current study we report on the findings of a field experiment (N = 25,580) conducted March 21–22 on Facebook during the critical initial weeks of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States. We observed that ad messages using a distant prosocial frame (“protect your community”) were in fact significantly less effective than those using a self-focused frame (“protect yourself”) in eliciting clickthroughs to official CDC recommendations. However, ad messages with a close prosocial frame (“protect your loved ones”) were equally effective as the self-focused frame. These findings catalog the differential efficacy of ad messaging strategies during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic.
Highlights
As the COVID-19 pandemic has spread throughout the world, local and federal governments, nonprofit organizations, and businesses have taken efforts to help slow the spread of the virus
We report on the results of an ad messaging study conducted in the field during March 2020, the critical initial time period in which the coronavirus crisis began to emerge within the United States
In a field experiment conducted on a major social media platform, we examined the effectiveness of prosocial ad messaging frames in facilitating the dissemination of public health recommendations online
Summary
As the COVID-19 pandemic has spread throughout the world, local and federal governments, nonprofit organizations, and businesses have taken efforts to help slow the spread of the virus. One key element of these efforts has been the need to effectively communicate information about risks and prevention strategies to the public. In the modern-day social media environment where users are bombarded with new and conflicting information, reaching people with important public health messages can be fairly challenging. Theory and evidence from the social sciences has the ability to play an important supporting role in aiding the dissemination of public health information and effectively coordinating individual behavior. By launching a set of advertisements on Facebook linking social media users to official recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), our goal was to examine how ad message framing may influence information-seeking behavior during the key initial weeks of the pandemic crisis
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