The Use of Visual Priming and Saliency To Promote Handwashing Behaviour

Abstract

The Covid-19 outbreak has caused a global pandemic, impacting the government's attempt to control the infection rate by making people comply with the health protocol. People compliance, on the other hand, is another problem the government needs to deal with because the benefit of complying with health protocol is not immediately visible. While persuading is challenging, nudge can be promising for its affordance and cost efficiency. We conducted two field experiments, both online and offline, to test nudge interventions to increase people's handwashing and handwashing with soap behaviour in one of the government offices. In Study 1, we found that visual priming of handwashing with foam and rhyming messages can lead to higher handwashing intention. In Study 2, we put this poster in one a handwashing facility, along with salient footprints pasted toward the sink. While only procuring handwashing facilities did not yield significant change in handwashing rate, our nudges did. Implication intervention in public space is explained.