Zombie Apocalypse: Can the Undead Teach the Living How to Survive an Emergency?

Abstract

Objective. We examined whether or not CDC's zombie apocalypse campaign had the ability to achieve the agency's goals of educating young people about emergency preparedness and prompting them to get ready by developing an emergency kit and plan. While the campaign was extremely popular, we examined the question of whether the campaign had the capability to translate into knowledge and action.Methods. We conducted an online experiment with 340 undergraduate students divided randomly into two groups. One group was exposed to CDC's zombie blog post; the other to the same preparedness information presented in CDC's traditional, straightforward way. Participants then completed a survey designed to gauge their affective feelings, perceptions, retention of preparedness preparation, and intent to develop an emergency kit and plan.Results. While participants who viewed the humorous zombie material clearly enjoyed it, their positive affect did not lead to greater retention of preparedness information or greater expressed intent to prepare, compared with participants exposed to the factual treatment. The zombie approach had no influence on retention or resulted in less retention relative to the factual approach. Also, there was no significant between-group difference in reported likelihood of developing an emergency kit or plan.Conclusion. While the campaign drew unprecedented traffic to CDC's website, our findings suggest that it lacked the capability to fully achieve the agency's goals of educating people about preparedness and prompting them to get ready. This finding supports previous studies concluding that it is challenging to design public health messages that evoke positive affect as well as intended changes in intentions or behaviors.

Interdisciplinary pressure cooker: environmental risk communication skills for the next generation

“…One option could have been the generation of fictional problems -potentially quite extreme ones. However, as the Zombie Preparedness initiative from the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) demonstrated that novelty and high engagement with fictional scenarios may not translate into long-term change (see CDC, 2017;Kruvand and Silver, 2013;Kruvand and Bryant, 2015;Fraustino and Ma, 2015). While the CDC campaign was aiming to affect change in end users, not build practitioner capacity, it indicates that some caution is needed.…”

Design skills for environmental risk communication. Design in and design of an interdisciplinary workshop

“…The case studies contrasted with more fantastic scenarios, such as the US CDC's Zombie preparedness initiative public engagement campaign (including resources for school children) (CDC, 2017, campaign originally run in 2011). Although the Zombie campaign was an imaginative and popular cross-media exercise, it was difficult to identify marked changes in behaviour by those who engaged with it and later studies conducted with the material indicated no long term change in participant behaviour around risk preparedness (Kruvand, Silver, 2013, Kruvand, Bryant 2015, Fraustino, Ma, 2015. While the Zombie campaign was focused on public engagement, not building capacity for practitioner skills, the follow up research listed above highlights the dangers of fictional scenarios, and especially the use of humour.…”

Interdisciplinary Pressure Cooker: environmental risk communication skills for the next generation

“…One option could have been the generation of fictional problemspotentially quite extreme ones. However, as the US CDC's Zombie preparedness initiative demonstrated, novelty and high engagement with fictional scenarios may not translate into long term change (see CDC, 2017 for the original campaign, and Kruvand, Silver, 2013, Kruvand, Bryant 2015, Fraustino, Ma, 2015 for follow up research on its effectiveness). While the CDC campaign was aiming to affect change in end https://doi.org/10.5194/gc-2019-9 Preprint.…”