The effectiveness of moral messages on public health behavioral intentions during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

With the COVID-19 pandemic threatening millions of lives, changing our behaviors to prevent the spread of the disease is a moral imperative. Here, we investigated the persuasiveness of messages inspired by three major moral traditions. A sample of US participants representative for age, sex and race/ethnicity (N=1032) viewed messages from either a leader or citizen containing deontological, virtue-based, utilitarian, or non-moral justifications for adopting social distancing behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic. We measured the messages’ effects on participants’ self-reported intentions to wash hands, avoid social gatherings, self-isolate, and share health messages, as well as their beliefs about others’ intentions, impressions of the messenger’s morality and trustworthiness, and beliefs about personal control and responsibility for preventing the spread of disease. Consistent with our pre-registered predictions, compared to non-moral control messages, deontological arguments had a modest effect on intentions to share the message. Message source (leader vs. citizen) did not moderate any of the observed effects of message type. A majority of participants predicted the utilitarian message would be most effective, but we found no evidence that the utilitarian message was effective in changing intentions or beliefs. We caution that our findings require confirmation in replication studies and are modest in size, likely due to ceiling effects on our measures of behavioral intentions and strong heterogeneity across all dependent measures along several demographic dimensions including age, self-identified gender, self-identified race, political conservatism, and religiosity. Although we found no evidence that the utilitarian message was effective in changing intentions and beliefs, exploratory analyses showed that individual differences in one key dimension of utilitarianism—impartial concern for the greater good—were strongly and positively associated with public health intentions and beliefs. Overall, our preliminary results suggest that public health messaging focused on duties and responsibilities toward family, friends and fellow citizens is a promising approach for future studies of interventions to slow the spread of COVID-19 in the US. Ongoing work is investigating the reproducibility and generalizability of our findings across different populations, what aspects of deontological messages may drive their persuasive effects, and how such messages can be most effectively delivered across global populations.

Measuring Realistic and Symbolic Threats of COVID-19 and their Unique Impacts on Wellbeing and Adherence to Public Health Behaviors

“…In Table 5 we provide all items used to assess compliance with public health behaviors and social identity affirmation in isolation. Everett et al, 2020; 1 = "Not at all" to 5 = "Always" scale)…”

“…In mere months, this novel coronavirus unleashed a global pandemic of COVID-19. The spread of the coronavirus is reshaping social life, and social psychology is at the forefront of studying these changes (e.g., Everett, Colombatto, Chituc, Brady, & Crockett, 2020;Van Bavel et al, 2020). Essential to this research is understanding-and measuring (Flake, Pek, & Hehman, 2017)-how people perceive the threat of the virus.…”

Functional Fear Predicts Public Health Compliance in the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Second, while our regression models have utility for informing how public health behavioral compliance can be predicted from an individual differences perspective, it lacks the identification and understanding of any potential barriers to bringing about said change. It is here where experimental studies emerging about the response to COVID-19 (e.g., Everett et al 2020) can be supplemented by correlational data such as ours in order to bring about a more comprehensive view of public health compliance and the effectiveness of government messaging. Finally, we are mindful that data has been collected at a single time point within an unprecedented period of time.…”

“…This research examines how to encourage prosocial and virus-mitigating responses (e.g., social distancing, or the non-hoarding of food and household supplies, and good hand hygiene). For example, Everett et al (2020) reported how communicating advice using deontological moral advice (i.e., in ways that invoke a sense of civic duty) has a modest effect on increasing a propensity to engage in behaviors that enhance a delay in the transmission of the virus (e.g., hand washing, avoiding large gatherings, and sharing government advice on preventing the spread of . This sense of duty taps into themes of interpersonal empathy, with Oosterhoff and Palmer (2020) findings that American adolescents who demonstrated higher levels of subjective self-interest were more likely to hoard supplies and less likely to refrain from nonessential social interactions.…”

Synergistic effects of anionic surfactants on coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) virucidal efficiency of sanitizing fluids to fight COVID-19

“…After the COVID-19 pandemic, world health organization (WHO) has recommended that individuals wash hands more frequently and at least for 20 seconds to ensure bacterial and virus removal from the skin [8,9]. It has been shown that the lipid outer layer of SARS-CoV-2 disrupts after long enough contact time with anionic surfactants [10].…”