a Pearson χ 2 test.
b Territories=Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut.
The results of the fixed factors in the mixed effects model are summarized in Table 2 (random effects: σ 2 =18.90, τ 00id =282.54, intraclass correlation coefficient=0.94, N id =3668, observations=7331, marginal R 2 =0.006, conditional R 2 = 0.938). Prior to exposure to the persuasive appeals, participants in all conditions reported similarly high intentions to engage in prevention behaviors. Prevention scores at T1 did not differ significantly between any appeal condition and the control condition, as shown in Table 2 ( P values for deontological, empathy, goal proximity, reciprocity, and victim are all greater than .05). This confirmed that random assignment produced groups with equivalent baselines. Furthermore, exposure to a reminder message about prevention behaviors (ie, control condition) increased participants’ intentions to engage in prevention behaviors (see Time [T2] variable in Table 2 ). Additionally, exposure to a persuasive message using an empathy appeal resulted in a larger increase in intentions to engage in prevention behaviors relative to the control message ( Table 2 ).
Mixed effects regression results for intentions to engage in prevention behaviors.
Predictors | Estimate, b (SE) | statistic | value | β (95% CI) | |
(Intercept) | 87.11 (0.72) | 121.04 | 3905.10 | <.001 | –.08 (–.16 to .00) |
Time [T2 ] | 2.12 (0.25) | 8.32 | 3663.20 | <.001 | .12 (.09 to .15) |
Deontological | 0.37 (1.00) | 0.37 | 3905.10 | .71 | .02 (–.09 to .13) |
Empathy | –0.61 (1.00) | –0.61 | 3905.10 | .54 | –.03 (–.15 to .08) |
Proximity | –0.52 (1.01) | –0.51 | 3905.10 | .61 | –.03 (–.14 to .08) |
Reciprocity | 0.71 (1.00) | 0.70 | 3905.10 | .48 | .04 (–.07 to .15) |
Victim | 0.44 (1.00) | 0.44 | 3905.10 | .66 | .03 (–.09 to .14) |
T2×Deontological | 0.47 (0.35) | 1.33 | 3663.38 | .19 | .03 (–.01 to .07) |
T2×Empathy | 1.04 (0.35) | 2.93 | 3663.38 | .003 | .06 (.02 to .10) |
T2×Proximity | 0.06 (0.36) | 0.17 | 3663.57 | .87 | .00 (–.04 to .04) |
T2×Reciprocity | 0.60 (0.35) | 1.69 | 3663.38 | .09 | .03 (–.01 to .07) |
T2×Victim | 0.53 (0.36) | 1.48 | 3663.20 | .14 | .03 (–.01 to .07) |
a T2: posttest time point.
Exposure to messages using other types of appeals (deontological, goal proximity, reciprocity, and victim) produced positive changes in intentions to engage in prevention behaviors (see Table 3 ), but these changes did not differ in magnitude from those produced by exposure to a simple reminder message (all P >.05). Figure 2 shows the estimated marginal means for each group and their 95% CIs.
Intention to engage in prevention behaviors before (T1) and after (T2) exposure to various appeals.
Appeal | Intention_T1 | Intention_T2 | T2–T1 | statistic | value | |
Control | 87.1 | 89.2 | 2.1 | 8.83 | 581 | <.001 |
Deontological | 87.5 | 90.1 | 2.6 | 10.83 | 620 | <.001 |
Empathy | 86.5 | 89.7 | 3.2 | 11.73 | 622 | <.001 |
Proximity | 86.6 | 88.8 | 2.2 | 8.71 | 600 | <.001 |
Reciprocity | 87.8 | 90.5 | 2.7 | 11.86 | 621 | <.001 |
Victim | 87.5 | 90.2 | 2.7 | 10.10 | 613 | <.001 |
Intention to engage in prevention behaviors across appeal conditions and measurement. Data are presented as marginal means with 95% CIs.
The preceding analysis suggested that, apart from empathy, the use of persuasive appeals does not improve intentions to engage in prevention behaviors beyond a simple reminder message. However, we expected the effectiveness of persuasive appeals to vary according to people’s initial dispositions. Persuasive appeals are likely effective when baseline intentions are relatively low, but may have a limited impact when baseline intentions are so high that there is little room for improvement. Results from the moderated regressions were consistent with our expectations (see Table 4 ). The appeal×baseline intentions interaction was statistically significant for all but the goal-proximity appeal, suggesting that the effectiveness of the deontological, empathy, reciprocity, and identifiable victim appeals indeed depends on the level of initial intentions.
Effect of appeal×initial intentions interaction on change in intentions to engage in prevention behavior.
Appeal×baseline intentions | Estimate, b (SE) | statistic | value | β (95% CI) | |
Deontological | –0.08 (0.02) | –4.29 | 1199 | <.001 | –.12 (–.17 to –.06) |
Empathy | –0.09 (0.02) | –4.60 | 1201 | <.001 | –.13 (–.18 to –.07) |
Proximity | –0.02 (0.02) | –1.14 | 1179 | .26 | –.03 (–.09 to –.02) |
Reciprocity | –0.08 (0.02) | –4.38 | 1200 | <.001 | –.12 (–.18 to –.07) |
Victim | –0.05 (0.02) | –2.75 | 1192 | .006 | –.08 (–.13 to –.02) |
We followed up with floodlight analyses [ 55 ] of each significant interaction. As shown in Figure 3 , the conditional effect of seeing a deontological appeal was significant only among participants who had a score of 85.5 or below on the initial intentions measure (30.2% of participants; mean 66.4). In other words, people with lower baseline intentions increased their intentions to engage in prevention behaviors more after seeing a message featuring a deontological appeal than after seeing a message featuring a simple reminder. In contrast, those with high baseline intentions (higher than 85.5; 69.8% of participants; mean 96.2) did not differ significantly in how much they changed their intentions when they saw a message featuring a deontological appeal or a message featuring a reminder.
Floodlight analysis of the interactive effects of appeal and baseline intentions. n.s: not significant ( P >.05).
We observed similar patterns with the other appeals. The conditional effect of empathy was significant only among participants scoring 90.1 or lower on initial intentions (39.5% of participants; mean 71.5), the conditional effect of reciprocity was significant only for those scoring 87.8 or lower on initial intentions (44.1% of participants; mean 68.7), and the conditional effect of identifiable victim was only significant for those scoring 84.8% or lower on initial intentions (29.3% of participants; mean 65.7).
The moderation analysis implied that a public health campaign using persuasive appeals would be most effective when targeting individuals with lower baseline intentions: but who might these individuals be?
The regression model using all demographic and attitudinal predictors explained a statistically significant and substantial proportion of the variance ( R 2 =0.51, F 16, 3415 =224.2, P <.001, adjusted R 2 =0.51). As shown in Table 5 , baseline intentions increased with age, perception of COVID-19 threat, perceived responsibility, and trust in institutions. Conversely, baseline intentions decreased with political conservatism, were lower for males relative to females, and were lower in the Prairies compared to Ontario. Neither education level nor ethnic background was significantly uniquely associated with baseline intentions to engage in prevention behaviors.
Multivariable regression model of initial intentions.
Predictors | Estimate, b (SE) | ( =3415) | value | β (95% CI) |
(Intercept) | 88.44 (0.57) | 155.99 | <.001 | .08 (.01 to .14) |
Age | 0.06 (0.01) | 4.41 | <.001 | .06 (.03 to .08) |
Gender [Male] | –1.74 (0.44) | –3.94 | <.001 | –.10 (–.15 to –.05) |
Gender [Other] | –3.01 (3.19) | –0.95 | .34 | –.17 (–.53 to .18) |
Ethnic [Minority] | –0.07 (0.54) | –0.13 | .90 | –.00 (–.06 to .06) |
Education [Some college] | –0.23 (0.68) | –0.35 | .73 | –.01 (–.09 to .06) |
Education [College] | –0.40 (0.63) | –0.63 | .53 | –.02 (–.09 to .05) |
Education [University] | 0.38 (0.61) | 0.63 | .53 | .02 (–.05 to .09) |
Education [Graduate degree] | –0.24 (0.79) | –0.30 | .76 | –.01 (–.10 to .07) |
Region [Maritimes] | –1.16 (0.79) | –1.46 | .14 | –.07 (–.16 to .02) |
Region [Quebec] | –0.22 (0.67) | –0.33 | .74 | –.01 (–.09 to .06) |
Region [Prairies] | –1.53 (0.57) | –2.68 | .007 | –.09 (–.05 to –.02) |
Region [British Columbia] | –1.02 (0.63) | –1.64 | .10 | –.06 (–.13 to .01) |
Political orientation | –0.39 (0.14) | –2.76 | .006 | –.03 (–.06 to –.01) |
COVID-19 threat | 0.15 (0.01) | 13.53 | <.001 | 0.21 (.18 to .24) |
Responsibility | 7.66 (0.24) | 31.90 | <.001 | .50 (.47 to .53) |
Trust | 0.08 (0.01) | 6.04 | <.001 | .09 (.06 to .12) |
At the time of writing, Canada was entering the fourth wave of COVID-19, with case and hospitalization numbers projected to spike in the coming weeks [ 2 , 22 ]. Maximizing vaccination coverage is paramount, but support for public health measures, including physical distancing, masking, staying home while sick, and avoiding crowded indoor spaces, is also critical for limiting the spread of the virus. This is particularly important since some jurisdictions have moved away from mandatory to recommended measures, relying on the public to make adherence decisions. There is an urgent need for effective messaging to increase adherence to public health measures.
Through a randomized online experiment, we tested the effectiveness of five messages featuring different persuasive appeals (deontological vs empathy vs goal proximity vs reciprocity vs identifiable victim) relative to a control message that simply listed the actions participants could take to help prevent the spread of COVID-19. A pretest-posttest design allowed us to assess and compare the change in intentions after exposure to the various messages. The study produced notable insights. First, baseline intentions across all conditions were relatively high (mean 87.18, SD 17.70 on a 100-point scale). Despite our effort to recruit a demographically representative sample, our pool of respondents may have been skewed toward higher compliance. High baseline intentions could also reflect a degree of social desirability bias in the responses. It is worth noting that similarly high levels of self-reported intentions have been observed in prior research [ 13 , 21 ].
Second, exposure to all messages, including the control message, resulted in a small but statistically significant increase in behavioral intentions. Moreover, the message featuring an empathy appeal increased behavioral intentions to a greater extent than the control message. Given how high intentions were to begin with, a small increase should be considered a significant win.
Third, the impact of persuasive appeals on change in intentions depended on how compliant people were in the first place. For those with lower baseline intentions, messages featuring empathy, deontological, reciprocity, and identifiable victim appeals resulted in greater change than the control message. These results are encouraging, as the intended persuasion targets are precisely those who are less compliant with public health measures.
Finally, the study confirmed much of what prior research had found regarding the correlates of public health compliance. Lower baseline intentions were associated with being male, younger, more politically conservative, residing in the Prairies, perceiving lower levels of COVID-19 threat, accepting less responsibility for the well-being of others, and lacking trust in public institutions [ 49 - 53 ]. These results provide a clear and actionable profile of the audiences that need to be targeted to maximize the efficiency of public health campaigns.
While the findings are reasonably informative, it is important to keep the study’s limitations in mind. For instance, the main outcome consisted of self-reported behavioral intentions. Since a gap often exists between intentions and behavior [ 56 ], the observed outcomes may not track perfectly with actual behavior. Moreover, as is the case for all studies of this kind, the results are likely context-dependent. The same appeals may produce vastly different responses in different countries and at different times, depending on cultural values and the COVID-19 situation on the ground. Thus, it is important not to overgeneralize when interpreting the results.
Importantly, the study used a single brief exposure to the messages, offering a conservative test of the messages’ persuasive power. Future research could investigate whether more frequent exposure or a prolonged exposure period would have a stronger impact. Future research could also test the impact of varying the message format (eg, video vs audio vs print), medium (eg, social media vs traditional media), and source. While the Public Health Agency of Canada is generally a trusted source [ 53 ], some groups may respond more positively to other sources (eg, trusted religious and community leaders). Although the focus of this study has been squarely on persuasive appeals, public health campaigns would do well to customize not only the content of the message but also its source, format, and media to maximize its impact across different audiences.
We would like to thank the team members at Critical Mass Inc who contributed to participant recruitment. This study was supported by an ImplementAB.digH Program Grant from Alberta Innovates (Grant 202101302).
OLS | ordinary least squares |
T1 | pretest time point |
T2 | posttest time point |
Multimedia appendix 2.
Authors' Contributions: MM, JLB, RL, MMF, JCB, KC, RJO, CC, TT, DAM, and JH conceived and designed the study. MM performed data analysis and wrote the first draft of the manuscript. All authors participated in critical revision of the manuscript and approved the final version. MM is the guarantor of the work and takes responsibility for the integrity of the data.
Conflicts of Interest: DAM reports non-financial support from ISPOR, grants from Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), Genome Canada, Arthritis Society, and Alberta Innovates; personal fees from Analytica, Illumina, and Novartis. The grants and fees were received during the the timeline of this study but were unrelated to it.
Editorial Notice
This randomized study was only retrospectively registered, explained by authors with the formative nature of the study. The editor granted an exception from ICMJE rules mandating prospective registration of randomized trials because the risk of bias appears low and the study was considered formative. However, readers are advised to carefully assess the validity of any potential explicit or implicit claims related to primary outcomes or effectiveness, as retrospective registration does not prevent authors from changing their outcome measures retrospectively.
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Research Article
Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing
Affiliations Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America, Center for the Study of American Politics, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America
Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing
* E-mail: [email protected]
Affiliations Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America, Center for the Study of American Politics, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America, Department of Political Science, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America
Roles Conceptualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing
Affiliations Institute for Global Health, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America, Department of Internal Medicine, Infectious Diseases, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America
Roles Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Writing – review & editing
Affiliations Institute for Global Health, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America, Department of Internal Medicine, Infectious Diseases, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America, Yale School of Public Health, New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America
What types of public health messages are effective at changing people’s beliefs and intentions to practice social distancing to slow the spread of COVID-19? We conducted two randomized experiments in summer 2020 that assigned respondents to read a public health message and then measured their beliefs and behavioral intentions across a wide variety of outcomes. Using both a convenience sample and a pre-registered replication with a nationally representative sample of Americans, we find that a message that reframes not social distancing as recklessness rather than bravery and a message that highlights the need for everyone to take action to protect one another are the most effective at increasing beliefs and intentions related to social distancing. These results provide an evidentiary basis for building effective public health campaigns to increase social distancing during flu pandemics.
Citation: Bokemper SE, Huber GA, James EK, Gerber AS, Omer SB (2022) Testing persuasive messaging to encourage COVID-19 risk reduction. PLoS ONE 17(3): e0264782. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0264782
Editor: Camelia Delcea, Bucharest University of Economic Studies, ROMANIA
Received: October 20, 2021; Accepted: February 16, 2022; Published: March 23, 2022
Copyright: © 2022 Bokemper et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Data Availability: Replication materials have been uploaded to Harvard Dataverse, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/VUKNOQ .
Funding: The authors acknowledge support from the Yale Institution for Social and Policy Studies, the Center for the Study of American Politics, and the Yale Institute for Global Health for funding this research.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Governments and public health officials have emphasized the importance of social (physical) distancing and other related measures in mitigating the spread of COVID-19. Given ongoing vaccine hesitancy, that vaccines are not fully effective in preventing COVID-19 infections, and the lack of vaccine access in certain parts of the world, the need for interventions that cause individuals to take actions that reduces the risk of infection remain essential. In practice, many messaging and communication strategies have been observed. However, despite these widespread and varied efforts, we lack a robust evidentiary basis for understanding the messages that are effective at increasing individuals’ willingness to embrace actions that reduce the spread of COVID-19.
We conducted two experiments to examine how different public health messages affect people’s beliefs about the efficacy of social distancing, their intentions to practice social distancing, and their attitudes about enforcing social norms, such as persuading others to practice social distancing and negatively judging those who do not. Experiment 1 was exploratory in nature and tested a large number of messages that combined elements from different conceptual frameworks discussed below in an effort to find messages that increased respondents’ intentions to practice social distancing and willingness to encourage others to do so.
In Experiment 2, we take the two most successful messages from Experiment 1 and conduct a preregistered trial using a nationally-representative sample of American adults against both a Baseline Informational control similar to that used in Experiment 1 and a placebo-treated control group that is not exposed to any information about COVID-19 risk reduction. In our second study, in light of ongoing discussions about other practices to reduce the spread of COVID-19, we also examined mask wearing, willingness to self-isolate if exposed to COVID-19, and cooperation with government contact tracing. In both studies, we examine the possibility that certain messages are more effective among specific segments of the population.
This paper offers three important contributions. First, we conduct a large-scale multi-message study of different messages designed to encourage COVID-19 risk reduction actions with multiple outcomes followed by a replication study of the most promising messages. Testing a large number of messages means we can directly assess the relative effectiveness of different messages, decompose compound messages into their component parts to understand which elements of those messages make them effective, and address concerns that prior studies testing individual messages and finding them effective are driven by false positives. Our repeat testing of promising messages also allows us to understand whether messages that are initially effective remain effective, helping to further rule out sampling variability and understand the durability of apparently effective messages in light of changing public rhetoric about COVID-19 [ 1 ]. Finally, our focus on multiple outcomes means that we can understand both whether messages are effective only for the targeted individual’s own risk reduction behavior or also affect their likelihood of encouraging others to undertake these protective behaviors.
Second, we test a large number of different messages, drawn from three broad and theoretically relevant categories. First, we test messages that differ in whether they frame social distancing as a self- or other-regarding action and whether they highlight reciprocity in producing desirable outcomes. While several other papers have considered other-regarding messages, we also explicitly test whether it is easier to promote other-regarding behavior when highlighting reciprocity—that is how the other-regarding behavior of other individuals is also helping to protect the person targeted for persuasion. Second, we test a set of messages we characterize as “values consistent.” These are messages that try to frame social distancing in terms of values individuals likely hold, so that individuals who might otherwise be resistant to the behavior undertake it. We also test messages observed in public health and political rhetoric at the time these studies were fielded. In all cases, we test these messages relative to both a pure control that does not provide any COVID-19 relevant content and to a baseline public health message that provides a simple informational basis for social distancing as well as an injunctive appeal for doing so. This latter comparison provides further leverage in isolating the effects of any novel persuasive rhetoric.
Finally, these messaging studies provide an important window into the efficacy and limitations of efforts to promote COVID-19 risk reduction in the early stages of the pandemic in the United States and as it later evolved. Existing work on public health messaging has demonstrated behavioral change in response to specific messages about tobacco use, consumption of sugary beverages, high risk sexual behavior, and vaccination uptake [ 2 – 6 ]. Messages used in past work often target one or a very small number of behaviors at a time. However, successful public health strategies that address the COVID-19 pandemic require large numbers of people to change a broad range of daily behaviors, such as how they interact with friends and relatives, whether they wear face coverings in public, and cooperation with government efforts to identify infectious individuals. This suggests that a more fruitful messaging strategy needs to change attitudes towards social distancing more broadly rather than targeted messaging to increase the prevalence of a specific action. Changes in attitudes could also increase the willingness of individuals to encourage others to engage in these behaviors—that is, to reinforce desired behaviors through social norms [ 7 – 9 ]. Importantly, unlike other health behaviors, many individuals are at a relatively low risk of serious COVID-19 complications, but their behavior is nonetheless important for reducing the risk to individuals who are more vulnerable as the disease continues to spread throughout the general population.
Before proceeding, we note that we use the term social distancing rather than physical distancing as it reflects the language at the time the experiments were fielded. As has been noted by other researcher, the term physical distancing may be more appropriate [ 10 – 14 ].
The emergence of COVID-19 created an urgent need for governments and public health officials around the globe to induce behavioral change among people in society writ large. While formal restrictions, like closing schools, prohibiting large gatherings, and restricting travel, can quickly produce behavioral change, slowing the spread of infectious diseases also requires voluntary action by individuals like working from home, avoiding dining inside restaurants, and refraining from socializing with friends and family. An important challenge for public health officials is persuading people to change a large number of behaviors that cause a significant disruption to daily routines.
Given the novelty of social distancing in the United States early in the pandemic and the large number of people being told to distance to keep themselves, their families, and their community safe, it was not clear ex ante what types of messaging strategies would be effective at increasing people’s willingness to dramatically change their daily lives. While considerable work on public health messaging has been produced during the pandemic, in the early stages it was important to understand whether any component of the “kitchen sink” messages observed being used could be effective at increasing people’s beliefs about the importance of social distancing and their intentions to engage in the behavior.
The large number of messages we tested were motivated by different approaches in behavioral science. Specifically, we combined appeals about 1) social norms, 2) self-interest vs. other-regarding motives, 3) individual vs. collective action, and 4) values reframing, to better understand whether attitudes toward social distancing could be changed with written persuasive messages.
Public health campaigns often invoke social norms to encourage the public to practice positive health behaviors, like wearing sunscreen [ 15 , 16 ], quitting smoking [ 17 ], and using condoms [ 18 ] (see also [ 19 ]). Beliefs about social norms have been shown to be powerful motivators of health behavior (for review, see [ 20 ]). Unsurprisingly, social norms theory has been applied to understanding people’s behaviors during the COVID-19, such as the decision to wear a mask [ 7 , 8 ] and whether to practice social distancing [ 9 , 21 – 23 ]. Social norms can be classified as either descriptive , i.e. what most people do, or injunctive , i.e. people’s beliefs about what they should do or what is believed to be the morally acceptable thing to do [ 24 ].
Early in the pandemic, public health experts had to rely on appealing to injunctive norms, emphasizing what most people should be doing to stay safe. Prior to COVID-19 infection becoming widespread in the United States, most people were not engaging in social distancing making it difficult to credibly appeal to descriptive norms as a way to increase the prevalence of the behavior. An appropriate baseline for comparison of messaging strategies about social distancing is therefore one that includes an appeal to injunctive norms, an approach that was relatively common at the beginning of the pandemic. Our baseline message therefore explains that public health officials believe individuals ought to socially distance to end the COVID-19 pandemic and details the specific health behaviors that people should undertake.
However, as social distancing became more widespread in the early months of the pandemic, public health messaging could also emphasize descriptive norms in conjunction with injunctive norms. For both social distancing and mask wearing, people report being more likely to engage in a public health promoting behavior when they report that others around them are doing so as well [ 7 , 9 ]. Descriptive social norms may also play a causal role in the decision to wear a mask. In a vignette-based experiment, respondents in the United States and Italy were more likely to report that they would wear a mask or ask someone to wear theirs properly when other people were described as wearing masks compared to when they were not [ 8 ]. This positive effect has also been observed when accounting for local ordinances and has been shown to be stronger when people also endorse the injunctive norm that social distancing is the morally correct behavior [ 25 ]. Thus, the combination of an injunctive norm with a descriptive norm may be especially likely to increase people’s willingness to engage in social distancing.
Descriptive social norms provide information about the prevalence of a behavior in a group of people, but this does not provide information as to why others are engaging in the behavior per se. That is, people may be practicing social distancing to protect themselves from contracting COVID-19, or they may also be practicing social distancing to protect others. It could also be that people are motivated by some combination of both motives. Past research has observed that both a concern for one’s own health and a concern for the health of others are motivations for social distancing behavior. In a survey of adults in North America and Europe, over 80% of respondents reported that they practice social distancing to protect themselves and to protect others [ 26 ]. Both motivations were also shown to be predictive of social distancing behavior in a computer-based scenario experiment in which participants reported their social distancing behavior in common daily situations, like meeting a friend or going to a grocery store [ 27 ]. Regarding concern for one’s own health, people who believe that they are more vulnerable to the disease are more likely to report higher levels of social distancing behavior [ 28 – 30 ]. Survey research has also examined the correlation between individual differences in personality and values has found that people who are more concerned about the well-being of others are more likely to engage in social distancing [ 31 – 34 ] and that this concern for others may be more predictive of behavior than concern for oneself [ 35 ]. Further, people who were less willing to place risk on others in an incentivized experiment were more likely to report engaging in social distancing than those who placed another individual at greater risk [ 36 ].
While both self-interested and prosocial motives are present in people’s decisions to engage in social distancing, research on persuasion and public health messaging has produced mixed results for the effectiveness of appealing to either motive on behavioral intentions related to social distancing. Posters highlighting an “identifiable victim” or the spread of the disease to many others have been shown to decrease the willingness to engage in behaviors that were thought to spread COVID-19, like meeting with a friend or relative in their house [ 37 ]. Other work has found that inducing empathy for someone who is particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 can increase social distancing intentions [ 38 ]. Jordan, Rand, and Yoeli [ 39 ] observed that a prosocial framing of social distancing on a flier, i.e. avoid spreading coronavirus, was more effective than a self-interested frame, i.e. avoid getting coronavirus, in March 2020, although the prosocial frame was no more effective than the self-interested frame in a related experiment fielded a month later. Prosocial and empathy-inducing messages delivered as text have also been shown to be no more effective than the informational control to which they were added [ 40 ]. Thus, it is not clear whether persuasive messaging that appeals to protecting oneself or protecting others consistently produces the intended behavioral change beyond simply providing people with information.
Descriptive social norms also do not convey how individual actions produce a benefit. Fundamentally, an outcome can be produced by individual or collective action, and the nature of a cooperative production function can differ substantially. In the case of individual production, public health campaigns could emphasize that each individual’s action produces a benefit. This approach aligns with past work on how beliefs about self-efficacy, an individual’s belief that they have the ability to perform an action to bring about a specific outcome, are an important determinant of whether an individual will perform a positive health behavior [ 41 , 42 ]. Beliefs about self-efficacy have been associated with intentions to practice social distancing in response to COVID-19 [ 43 , 44 ] and a hypothetical flu pandemic [ 45 ]. Thus, public health messaging may emphasize the importance of individual action as a means of protecting oneself and protecting others against COVID-19.
Alternatively, public health appeals could instead emphasize that the overall success of social distancing depends on collective action. Social distancing can be thought of as a collective action problem in which people have to work together to produce a group benefit. These types of cooperation dilemmas are widespread in human society and they vary in how the successful provision of a collective benefit is achieved [ 46 ]. One important feature of arguments that combine cooperative production with descriptive norms is that they invoke notions of reciprocity, the idea that one’s (costly) actions are being reciprocated by others in society, a factor that is shown to increase a willingness to undertake costly action [ 47 – 49 ].
The mapping between cooperative actions and outcomes may also vary. For one, social distancing to reduce the spread of COVID-19 could be thought of as a linear public good in which each individual’s social distancing provides an additional benefit to others. In this view, even if many people do not practice social distancing, those who do will still provide some benefit, although the fact each person’s actions matter may also encourage free-riding. Alternatively, social distancing could be thought of as a threshold public good in which the benefits are not realized until a critical mass of individuals engage in the behavior [ 50 ]. In this case, the possibility of not reaching a critical threshold may counteract the tendency to free-ride, although if the number of individuals falls short of the threshold, the benefit of social distancing is not produced and so one’s willingness to act may depend on believing enough other people are doing so.
One limitation of norm based approaches for policymakers and public health officials is that some people believe that COVID-19 does not pose a threat [ 27 , 51 ] or that social distancing violates another value they care about, such as displaying bravery rather than living in fear, an argument that appeared in the rhetoric of then President Donald Trump [ 52 , 53 ]. Rather than attempting to convince people with these beliefs about the threat posed by COVID-19, it may instead be effective when trying to persuade them to social distance to instead frame the action of social distancing as aligning with a value that they already hold [ 54 ]. For instance, bravery and risk-taking are generally viewed as attractive traits across a variety of cultures [ 55 – 57 ]. And indeed, many individuals, like medical professionals and emergency responders, demonstrated these desirable traits during the COVID-19 pandemic. Is reframing the act of social distancing as demonstrating an individual’s strength and bravery an effective strategy? A values-based approach has been shown to be effective at increasing attitudes toward masking among American conservatives when messaging appealed to loyalty moral values [ 58 ]. More broadly, other work has considered how metaphors can be useful ways to frame responses to the pandemic in ways that people can easily relate to [ 59 ].
We present results from two experiments that combined elements of the theoretical approaches describe above to assess the efficacy of persuasive messages to increase people’s willingness to practice social distancing.
In Experiment 1, we tested the efficacy of a large number of messages against a Baseline Informational control message that defined social distancing and stated that public health experts believe it would reduce the spread of COVID-19. We note that this message also invoked an injunctive norm because it states public health experts believe people ought to be social distancing. This was a more conservative approach than testing against an untreated control group, which we chose because we were searching for promising messages that could outperform the baseline content most similar to extant public health outreach and to which they were added in the experimental context. Our focus in Experiment 1 is to examine whether any message outperforms that Baseline Informational content to which it was added.
In Experiment 2, we re-tested the two most promising messages from Experiment 1 on a nationally-representative sample of Americans against the Baseline Informational control and a separate placebo control message.
Participants were randomly assigned to read a Baseline Informational message or to one of ten intervention messages. Due to the number of comparisons that utilize the baseline message, we assigned participants to this message with a 3/13 chance, while the remaining ten intervention messages each had a 1/13 chance of assignment. The survey was administered using Qualtrics survey software. Both experiments presented here were fielded under an exemption granted by the Yale IRB and written consent was obtained before participants could begin the study.
We used a self-service online platform provided by the survey firm Lucid to recruit a sample of American adults ( n = 3,184). Lucid provides a diverse sample of respondents that more closely matches demographic characteristics of nationally representative samples than other survey platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk [ 60 ]. Approximately 81% of respondents assigned to an intervention completed the survey. Attrition was lower among those assigned to most of the intervention messages apart from the Baseline Informational message, by up to 8 percentage points. We did not find that pre-treatment covariates that explain outcomes differentially predicted attrition. The final analyzed sample was 2,568 respondents.
Participants were randomly assigned to read a Baseline Informational message that defined social distancing and stated that public health experts believe it would reduce the spread of COVID-19 or to one of ten intervention messages grouped into three categories. Each intervention message was added to the Baseline Informational message that included an injunctive norm statement. Table 1 shows the full text of the treatment messages and displays which parts of each tap into various theoretical constructs.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0264782.t001
The first category of messages varied the beneficiary of social distancing behaviors and whether individual or collective action was needed to produce these benefits. In all of these messages, descriptive social norms were invoked by describing others as already social distancing (“Many other people are already social distancing.”). The beneficiary of social distancing was either the individual (“you could get sick and die”) or others (“members of your family and community could get sick and die”). We combined manipulation of the beneficiary with what was necessary to produce this benefit. Specifically, social distancing was framed as providing a benefit if an individual practiced it (individual action, “when you practice social distancing you reduce the risk”), if enough other people practiced it (threshold collective action, “if enough people practice social distancing then we can reduce the risk”), or for each additional person who practiced (linear collective action, “every person who practices social distancing reduces the risk”). As we note above, the latter two frames about collective production also emphasized norms of reciprocity in that they linked others’ behaviors to outcomes relevant for the respondent. Crossing these two dimensions of manipulation produced the six total intervention messages in this category.
The second category of messages were efforts at value reframing and stated that people who believe they are being brave by continuing with their daily routines despite the threat of the virus are actually being reckless. Theses message start with an example of people who are being brave during the pandemic, e.g. firefighters, and then takes a seemingly desirable action as incompatible with a value and reframes it instead as selfish and unattractive (“people who don’t practice social distancing… aren’t brave, they are reckless”). The message also emphasizes that by not social distancing, people are placing others at risk, i.e. the opposite of true bravery. This reframing was either presented alone (Reframing Bravery) or with language about how people who spread COVID-19 pollute the environment around them (Reframing Bravery + Pollution).
The final category of messages invoked the idea that practicing social distancing would facilitate returning to “normal” life before the COVID-19 pandemic (“Social distancing now means we can more quickly return to our normal way of life”) or that doing so involved adapting to an unavoidable “new normal” (“we are adapting to the ‘new normal’ necessary because of COVID-19”). These two messages were designed to mirror rhetoric being used by political leaders and in the media and were added to the Other-regarding, Linear Cooperation message.
We form four mean scales as outcome measures, with all scales ranging from 0 to 1 with 1 indicating behaviors or beliefs associated with reducing the spread of COVID-19. The four scales were: 1) a BELIEFS/norms scale that assesses agreement with beliefs about social distancing being important for your health and others people’s health and whether an individual would feel guilty for not practicing social distancing, 2) a social distancing (DISTANCING) scale that captures people’s intended willingness to social distance, avoid attending gatherings, forego elective medical procedures, and wear a mask, 3) a FOOD behavior scale that assesses people’s willingness to avoid high-risk food related behavior like going to a restaurant, and 4) a persuade/evaluate OTHERS scale that measures whether people would persuade others to social distance, report a business for violating rules, and negatively judge non-compliers. Several items in the DISTANCING and FOOD scales had previously been shown to be affected by rhetoric focusing on selfish and prosocial motivations for social distancing [ 39 ]. All of the outcomes were coded such that higher values corresponded to attitudes and behavioral intentions consistent with greater social distancing. The internal consistency of the scales was generally good with the exception of the FOOD scale, which had a Cronbach’s Alpha of 0.65. Full text of outcome measures and scaling information appears in S1 Appendix .
We analyze our data using OLS regression comparing outcomes to the Baseline Informational message using indicators for each treatment and including pre-treatment demographic covariates to improve efficiency. Two messages appear particularly promising compared to the Baseline Informational message, with all treatment effect estimates plotted in Fig 1 . (Underlying regression analysis and distribution of scale outcomes appears in the S2 Appendix ). Among the messages that appear most effective, the Other-regarding, Linear Cooperation message also performs well relative to the Baseline Informational condition. For all four scales, the estimated effects of this message are positive. For the social distancing scale, the effect is .034 (95% CI: .002, .067) or 14.7% of a standard deviation. Respondents’ beliefs about the importance of social distancing also increase with an estimated effect of .040 (95% CI: -.002, .084) on the BELIEFS scale. The effect on the FOOD scale is .038 (95% CI: -.003, .079). The latter two effects are not statistically significant at the conventional 5% level, but do provide evidence that the Other-regarding, Linear Cooperation message broadly moved beliefs relevant to practicing social distancing.
Estimates displayed with 95% confidence intervals. Each panel shows the effect of each treatment message relative to the Baseline Informational condition for a primary outcome scale. All outcomes scales were coded such that higher values indicate more positive attitudes or intentions toward social distancing.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0264782.g001
The Reframing Bravery message increases all four scale outcomes. The estimated effect on the OTHERS scale is .058 (95% CI: .023, .092), indicating that respondents who read the Reframing Bravery message report more willingness to enforce norms to promote social distancing. We also observe suggestive evidence that this message affects both the BELIEFS scale and the own social distancing scale. For the BELIEFS scale the estimate is .037 (95% CI: -.005, .079) or about 12.8% of a standard deviation, while the effect for the DISTANCING scale is .030 (95% CI: -.004, .064) or about 13% of a standard deviation. The estimated effect for the FOOD scale is positive, but imprecise.
It is also interesting that two messages appear, on average, less effective than the Baseline Informational content and the Other-regarding, Linear Cooperation message to which they are added. While no coefficient estimates are individually statistically significant, both the Return to Normal and New Normal messages are generally less effective than the content to which they were added across our primary outcome measures.
We also conduct a number of exploratory analyses for heterogeneous treatment effects by age, gender, partisanship, and geographic location and do not uncover large differences in average treatment effectiveness across these groups ( S3 Appendix ). Due to the rhetoric among the public and political elites surrounding the degree to which measures to address the spread of COVID-19 infringe upon people’s liberties, we elicited people’s adoption of a liberty moral foundation that captures their belief about the role of government in society [ 61 ]. We found evidence that intervention effectiveness varies by endorsement of liberty values. Compared to respondents below the mean in their adoption of liberty values, respondents who are above the mean in their adoption of liberty are more responsive to the Reframing Bravery message than to the Baseline Informational condition on the BELIEFS scale (p = .05) and OTHERS scale (p < .01), with weaker evidence for the DISTANCING scale (p = .14). The effects of the Reframing Bravery message are uniformly statistically insignificant for those low in liberty.
The two most promising messages were the Other-regarding, Linear Cooperation message and the Reframing Bravery message. Both were the highest performing messages on at least two of the four outcome scales when compared to the baseline content to which they were added. Given this, these messages were the ones that were selected to be re-tested on a nationally representative sample of Americans to discern whether they are more effective than the Baseline Informational content to which they were added. Additionally, we believe there was value in retesting the most effective messages at a later point in the time in the pandemic when attitudes about social distancing may have become more crystallized, perhaps making people harder to persuade.
Experiment 2 retested the two most successful interventions in Experiment 1 (Reframing Bravery, and Other-regarding Linear Cooperation and the Baseline Informational compared to an untreated Control message about an unrelated topic (bird feeding)). Experiment 2 was a pre-registered trial fielded between mid-July and early August 2020, a time when the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States had become far more widespread than during Experiment 1 [ 62 ]. We allocated respondents with equal probability to each intervention and written consent was obtained prior to participation.
We used the survey firm YouGov to recruit a nationally-representative sample of American adults. Respondents completed the study on their personal electronic devices. Power calculations indicated greater than 80% power to detect treatment effects 75% as large as in Experiment 1 with an N of 3,000 assuming scale distributions were the same as observed in Experiment 1. The study was fielded twice because of an implementation error in programming by the vendor for survey content that followed the items analyzed here for the first fielding (the error was for items for an unrelated project that was not about COVID-19, and which followed all of the items analyzed here). Consequently, the vendor re-fielded the entire survey resulting in a sample that was approximately twice as large as the sample described in our pre-registration document ( n = 3,000 pre-registered, n = 6,079 in final analysis dataset). YouGov does not provide data for respondents who decline to participate or drop out during the study.
The Baseline Informational treatment message was slightly modified from Experiment 1 to reflect changing guidance during the pandemic. It read:
To end the COVID-19 pandemic, public health officials believe we should practice social distancing. Social distancing means that you should:
The additional content added to this baseline for the Other-regarding, Linear Cooperation and the Reframing Bravery messages was unchanged from how they appear in Table 1 .
We made incremental changes to the four scales (BELIEFS, DISTANCING, FOOD, and OTHERS) used in Experiment 1 to reflect changing policies and circumstances. Given that contemporary discourse around social distancing had changed, we included new items that reflected what people were likely thinking about in their daily lives. We added items to the DISTANCING scale about attendance at religious services, participation in political events, self-isolation following COVID-19 exposure, and alerting public health authorities if diagnosed with COVID-19. For the OTHERS scale we added an item about cooperating in contact tracing. In the months between our studies, the behaviors we added to the scales had become salient in public discourse about COVID-19 risk reduction. We also included a new MASK scale composed of items about wearing a face covering in six circumstances, as well as relative willingness to shop at a store that requires rather than prohibits face masks. These additional items (and perhaps the passage of time) increased the reliability of the four scales that were used in Experiment 1 with the FOOD scale having the lowest reliability (Cronbach’s alpha of 0.78). The modified outcome text and scale reliability appears in S4 Appendix .
At the time this experiment was fielded, messaging outside of the experimental context about the importance of items in our DISTANCING scale had become far more widespread, although mask wearing remained a contested policy tool. It was therefore unclear whether messaging would be similarly effective in this new context.
We find baseline increases in scores on the BELIEFS and DISTANCING scales over time (i.e., averages for these outcomes in the bird feeding Control message in Experiment 2 are greater than the averages in the Baseline Informational condition in Experiment 1). Fig 2 plots main effects of message efficacy compared to the Control message for all outcomes (underlying regression analysis and distribution of scale outcomes appears in S5 Appendix ). The Baseline Informational message is associated with increased BELIEFS and DISTANCING scores (p < .05, one-sided, in both cases) relative to the bird feeding message. The Reframing Bravery and Other-regarding, Linear Cooperation messages appear to be more effective, however. Each is associated with a statistically significant increase in four outcomes: the BELIEFS, DISTANCING, OTHERS, and MASKS scales, with p-values < .05, one-sided, in all cases. The magnitudes of these effects are approximately 0.1 standard deviation for each measure. None of the messages have large or statistically precise effects on the FOOD scale.
Compared to the placebo control, the Baseline Informational message, the Reframing Bravery message, and the Other-regarding, Linear Cooperation increase beliefs and reported behavioral intentions to practice social distancing. These are OLS regression coefficient estimates for each primary outcome by treatment compared to the placebo control with 90% confidence intervals. The dashed vertical line represents the effect of the Baseline Informational Message on an outcome. All outcomes scales were coded such that higher values indicate more positive attitudes or intentions toward social distancing.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0264782.g002
There is less clear evidence that these messages are incrementally more effective that the Baseline Informational content to which they are added. For the BELIEFS, DISTANCING, OTHERS, and MASKS scales, both the Reframing Bravery and Other-regarding, Linear Cooperation messages are associated with effects that are always larger than the Baseline Informational message, with the magnitudes of these differences ranging from 22% to 88% and averaging 50%. Because effect sizes are still modest, however, these differences are not generally statistically distinguishable at p < .05, two-sided, with the notable exception of the Reframing Bravery message which has an effect 88% larger than the Baseline Informational message on the OTHERS scale.
Differences in effects for those who endorse liberty values partially confirm Study 1 (See S6 Appendix ). Compared to the Control message, the Reframing Bravery message is more effective among those who endorse liberty for encouraging social distancing—it increases DISTANCING measure by .027 units (90% CI: .009, .043), an effect that is 70% larger than the effect for those who do not endorse liberty values. This difference is not significant, however, and the estimates for the other outcomes are inconsistently signed. If we instead focus on the relative effectiveness of the Reframing Bravery message compared to the Baseline Informational message, a test that accounts for the fact that those who endorse liberty values may respond differently to the baseline content, we uncover more evidence that those who endorse liberty values respond more to the Reframing Bravery treatment. In particular, for those who endorse liberty values, the Reframing Bravery message is between 20% and 125% more effective than the Baseline message for the five primary outcomes. The largest difference is for the DISTANCING scale outcome, where the difference is .014 (90% CI: -.004, .033).
In addition to our scale outcomes, we also examine results for several individual items of particular interest, including the three measures of compliance with government policies to reduce the spread of COVID-19 discussed above: Self-isolation for those exposed, alerting authorities if testing positive, and cooperation with authorities in contact tracing. These items are included in the DISTANCING behavior index, but are also individually of interest because they are areas where governments have reported difficulty obtaining compliance. Fig 3 show that the Reframing Bravery message is associated with a statistically significant increase in self-isolation and willingness to alert authorities, effects that are larger than and statistically distinguishable from the effects of the Baseline Informational message. (Underlying regression results appear in S5 Appendix ) Similarly, the Other-regarding, Linear Cooperation message is associated with a statistically significant increase in self-isolation and willingness to cooperate in contact tracing, effects that are larger than and statistically distinguishable from the effects of the Baseline Informational message.
The Reframing Bravery and Other-regarding, Linear Cooperation message increase respondents reported intentions to not engage in key behaviors to reduce the spread of COVID-19 and to cooperate with government officials, even compared to the Baseline Informational message. This figure shows OLS regression coefficient estimates compared to the Control message with 95% confidence intervals. All outcomes scales were coded such that higher values indicate more positive attitudes or intentions toward social distancing.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0264782.g003
Second, we also examine effects for three isolated behaviors, attendance at religious gatherings and inside visits to a friend and family member’s house. Religious gatherings emerged as sources of conflict over prohibitions on group meetings ( 18 ), while private indoor meetings are thought to be vehicles by which asymptomatic individuals expose those who are at more serious risk for infection. Once again, these items are individually in the DISTANCING behavior index. Results appear in Fig 3 . The Reframing Bravery Message is associated with statistically significant increases in all three outcomes, while the Other-regarding, Linear Cooperation message is associated with changes in both the family and friend small gathering outcomes. The Reframing Bravery effect for attendance at religious services is statistically distinguishable from the effect of the Baseline Informational message (p < .05). The Other-regarding, Linear Cooperation effect for each type of private gatherings is also statistically larger than the effect of the Baseline Informational message (p < .03 and .05, respectively).
In Experiment 2 we find that the Baseline Informational message, the Other-regarding Linear Cooperation message, and the Reframing Bravery message outperform the placebo control message on the primary outcome scales, with the exception of the FOOD scale. Moreover, this experiment replicates the finding from Experiment 1 that respondents who are high in liberty values are more responsiveness to the Reframing Bravery message.
The results presented here show that public health messaging can increase behavioral intentions and beliefs about social distancing that helps reduce the spread of COVID-19. Specifically, we observed that an Other-regarding, Linear Cooperation message that 1) focused people on protecting others, 2) increased the salience of risk presented by COVID-19, 3) emphasized that other people were social distancing, and 4) stated that every person who practices social distancing protects others was effective at increasing attitudes and behavioral intentions related to social distancing. We also found that a Reframing Bravery message that 1) gave examples of bravery, 2) reframe not social distancing as not being brave, but being reckless, and 3) emphasized that not social distancing is not attractive and places others at risk was effective. Importantly, these messages are effective in both an initial study fielded in May 2020 and in a replication study fielded in August 2020, and this efficacy is in comparison to a Baseline Informational message communicating the factual basis for social distancing behavior and instructing others to do so. We observe these effects for measures of a respondent’s own intended social distancing activities as well as for how individuals are likely to behave toward others who do not social distance.
It is also worth noting that a simple Baseline Informational message that invoked an injunctive norm that people should be social distancing and explained what social distancing was outperformed a placebo-control condition in Experiment 2. This suggests that relatively early in the pandemic simply providing people with information and emphasizing that doing these things is the correct behavior may be enough to increase attitudes toward social distancing and behavioral intentions to do so.
Moral foundations theory, [ 61 , 63 ] which postulates that humans have several underlying common values that are differentially emphasized by various individuals, has been used to explain health behaviors such as vaccination [ 64 ]. Increasingly, opposition to public health measures is grounded in the language of personal freedoms [ 64 ] and, indeed, concerns about government infringement on personal freedoms have arisen during the COVID-19 pandemic [ 65 , 66 ]. We find that emphasis on liberty value modifies the impact of the Reframing Bravery intervention indicating that such messages are particularly powerful for those for whom personal freedoms are important.
A potential avenue future research could explore how messaging strategies interact with people’s motivation for social distancing. Past research has found that many people engage in social distancing to protect themselves and to protect others [ 26 ]. However, other work has observed that people who endorsed conspiracy theories were more concerned about themselves and were also less likely to report intentions to practice social distancing [ 67 ]. Given heterogeneity in people’s motivations to protect themselves or to protect others, some messaging strategies, like the Other-regarding, Linear Cooperation message, may have different effects depending on whether it aligns with the motivation that a given individual holds. More broadly, future work should consider how people’s concern for themselves and concern for others interact with how receptive they are to specific public health campaigns.
This work has several limitations that should be considered alongside the results. First, while we observe robust attitudinal change in response to persuasive messaging, we do not observe actual behavioral change. Given the relatively small effect sizes, approximately 0.1 standard deviation increases on the primary outcomes in Experiment 2, these treatment messages as written communication may be insufficient to push people to change their behavior. Second, we utilized compound treatments that invoked many different constructs that are thought to produce attitude and behavioral change. Future work should focus on disentangling whether specific elements of the messages are particularly effective at promoting social distancing. Third, policymakers and public health experts had repeatedly emphasized the importance of social distancing and survey respondents may have over-reported their intentions to social distance due to social desirability concerns, though past work has found that reported behavioral intentions correlate with actual behavior [ 68 ] and people’s self-reported behavior is not affected by social desirability bias [ 69 ]. Third, as the COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly evolved and different behaviors, like masking or vaccination, have become more salient in public discourse, the messages that we find to be effective in summer 2020 may not be as effective as the pandemic has progressed. Finally, we only measured attitudes and behavioral intentions at a single point in time so we cannot make claims about the duration of the effects that we observe.
Our findings can inform both mass public health messaging initiatives (e.g. those deployed on social and electronic media) as well as interpersonal communication strategies such as healthcare provider-level communication and persuasion. While this work shows robust attitudinal changes in response to public health messaging, additional research is necessary to determine which specific elements of the treatments produced these changes.
S1 appendix. experiment 1 outcomes..
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0264782.s001
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0264782.s002
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0264782.s003
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0264782.s004
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0264782.s005
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0264782.s006
Persuading people to engage in specific health behaviors is critical to prevent the spread of and mitigate the harm caused by COVID-19. Most of the research and practice around this issue focuses on developing effective message content. Importantly, though, persuasion is often critically dependent on choosing appropriate targets — that is, on selecting the best audience for one’s message. Three experiments conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic explore this target selection process and demonstrate misalignment between who persuaders target and who will display the greatest attitude and behavior change. Although people prefer to send messages encouraging COVID-19 prevention behaviors to targets with slightly negative attitudes toward the behaviors in question, their messages can often have more impact when sent to targets whose attitudes are slightly favorable. Recent insights in categorical perception and message positioning effects in persuasion help explain this misalignment.
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Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume 9 , Article number: 35 ( 2022 ) Cite this article
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This article explores the Facebook posts of Norway’s Prime Minister Erna Solberg to highlight the key features of her crisis communication during the COVID-19 pandemic. It draws on data from Solberg’s Facebook posts from February 27, 2020 to February 9, 2021 (i.e., starting from the day when the first case of COVID-19 was recorded in Norway until the time of data collection for this study). Out of her 271 posts, 157 of them were about COVID-19 and were chosen for analysis. The analyses identified five major themes: (1) Promoting responsibility and togetherness (2) Coping (3) Being in control amidst uncertainty (4) Fostering hope and (5) Relating with the followers. Drawing inspiration from Boin, Stern and Sundelius’, work on persuasive narratives, this study shows the ways that Solberg’s posts about COVID-19 exhibit all five identified frame functions. In addition, the findings add contextual nuances to the frame functions through the theme of ‘Responsibilization and togetherness’, which are reflected through references to Norwegianness and the cultural concept and practice of dugnad . This study adds to our knowledge about how persuasive narratives are incorporated into the social media communication strategies of leaders and highlights the usefulness of this framework for studying ongoing and future crises.
Introduction.
The economic and social disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is having major impacts on people’s livelihoods and their health. As of 18 April 2021, there have been 140,322,903 confirmed cases of SARS-CoV-2 infections and 3,003,794 deaths (WHO, 2021 ), making the COVID-19 pandemic an unprecedented global health crisis of the century. As countries across the world grapple with mitigating the risks associated with the pandemic, communication—an essential component of planning, response, and recovery during crisis (Houston et al., 2014 )—has been one of the integral parts of the crisis management (Reddy and Gupta, 2020 ). Crisis communication highlights legitimation strategies, but also indicates how government institutions themselves make sense of crises (Brandt and Wörlein, 2020 ). Moreover, crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic can disrupt the socio-political order of societies, leaving a cognitive void in the minds of the public that can be filled with fear and uncertainty (Boin et al., 2016 ). In Norway, COVID-19 has been called a fear-driven pandemic that is based on alarming information of long-term illness and disability that is out of politicians control (Vogt and Pahle, 2020 ). Having control over the dramaturgy of political communication is thus central to effective leadership and crisis management (Boin et al., 2016 ). Effective communication can help societies handle uncertainty and promote adherence to behaviour change while fostering hope among the citizens (Finset et al., 2020 ).
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to rapidly evolve, and social media plays a pivotal role in meeting the communication needs of the public during such crisis (Van Dijck, 2013 ). As social media use increases during crises, leaders and public officials may utilise this platform to communicate, which in return helps reduce public panic and builds trust (Kavanaugh et al., 2012 ). As a result of the cultural and symbolic value of social media in contemporary times (Jenzen et al., 2021 ), the communication of public leaders in the midst of uncertainty and fear facilitates interpersonal and group interaction. Research has shown that, when compared to the traditional media platforms, social media platforms are used by leaders and elected officials to communicate, inform, and engage with their citizens (Golbeck et al., 2010 ). They use social media to spread messages farther and faster than it would be possible with traditional media (Sutton et al., 2013 ). What leaders post on social media can give insights into their communication and leadership strategies during crises. Understanding how leaders communicate with the public during crises will not only provide us with the knowledge about their governance styles but will also guide us to their meaning-making in times of uncertainty. Based on this assumption we will be studying the Facebook posts of Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg, with the aim to highlight the key features of her communication. In doing so, we will take an exploratory rather than confirmatory perspective (Boudreau et al., 2001 ).
Solberg, member of the Conservative Party and in power since 2013, was defeated by the centre-left as this paper was being revised. Solberg has had a long career in politics, becoming a deputy representative to the Bergen City Council in 1979 when she was 18 years old. She was elected to the Parliament in 1989 where she was the youngest member of her party group (Notaker and Tvedt, 2021 ). Solberg’s tough stance on issues such as immigration earned her the nickname of ‘Jern-Erna’ [Iron Erna] (Reuters, 2013 ). However, upon her appointment as Prime Minister, Solberg displayed a ‘softer side’ by caring about voters’ jobs, health, and schools (Notaker and Tvedt, 2021 ).
The first Norwegian COVID-19 patient was diagnosed on February 26, 2020. While the initial spread of infection was relatively slow, cases increased quickly by March 12 th , after winter break for schools ended and many Norwegians returned from skiing holidays in Northern Italy (Dagsavisen, 2020 ). On March 12, the Norwegian Directorate of Health (NDH) adopted comprehensive measures to prevent the spread, which included closing day care centres, schools, and educational institutions. The measures also included a ban on cultural events, closed swimming gyms and pools, a halt to all service provisions that involved being less than one meter away from another person, and prohibiting visits to recreational cabins Footnote 1 , among others. Behavioural measures such as recommendations to keep physical distance, encourage handwashing, quarantine, stay home when ill, work from home, and avoid public transportation were also included. Following the lockdown, Norway became the first European country to announce that the situation was under control due to low levels of hospitalizations and mortalities (Christensen and Lægreid, 2020 ). In Norway, as of March 22, 2021, there have been over eighty thousand confirmed cases of coronavirus infection and more than six hundred deaths due to COVID-19. Norway has had far fewer COVID-19 cases, deaths, and hospitalizations per capita than most other countries in Western Europe or the United States (Christensen and Lægreid, 2020 ). Compared to its Scandinavian neighbours Denmark and Sweden, the proportion of cases of infections and deaths have been much lower (WHO, 2021 ), despite the three countries sharing similar social welfare and healthcare systems. Recently, a report submitted by the Corona Committee in Norway also concluded that the overall handling of the crisis by the government has been good. Not only has the number of infections and deaths in Norway been much lower than most countries in Europe, but the healthcare services have also remained stable, and society has remained relatively open (Lund, 2021 ). It is probable that good governance and responsible leadership demonstrated by the Norwegian cabinet and Prime Minister Erna Solberg contributed to this success.
In Norway, there is considerably less focus on individualization of candidates in political parties as compared to for instance the US, since the electoral system in Norway is based on proportional representation (Karlsen and Enjolras, 2016 ). Despite this, with the presence of digital and social media, there has been increasing focus on the individual candidates, leading to ‘decentralising personalisation’ (Karlsen and Enjolras, 2016 ; Balmas et al., 2014 ). Given this context, Erna Solberg’s Facebook account during the COVID-19 pandemic serves as an intermediary platform between the government’s role and her own personal profile as the Prime Minister who has been handling the COVID-19 crisis. Solberg has used Facebook more actively than other outlets like Twitter and has more followers on Facebook than any other platform. The proportion of Facebook users in Norway vis-a-vis other social media platform is also the highest (for example, 84% of people use Facebook compared to 22% who use Twitter who use Twitter) (Werliin and Kokholm, 2016 ). Facebook thus serves as an important platform for public leaders in Norway during crises, and therefore, by analysing Solberg’s Facebook posts, we aim to demonstrate the key features of her communication strategy during the COVID-19 crisis.
Crisis is defined as a rare, and significant public situation creating undesirable consequences (Coombs, 2015 ; Gruber et al., 2015 ). In most cases it is ‘an unpredictable event that threatens important expectancies of stakeholders and can seriously impact an organization’s performance and generate negative outcomes’ (Coombs, 2015 : p. 3). Crisis communication on the other hand is referred as the strategies used to lessen the uncertainties during crisis via the dissemination and exchange of information (Collins et al., 2016 ). Effective crisis communication establishes reliability and maintains public trust. It should be frequent, consistent and involve compassionate messages conveyed in an inspired and transformational communication style. It is essential that public officials and leaders when communicating crisis relevant information be efficient and informative. Past research has shown the importance of repetition of the consistent interaction to help the message reach the recipients clearly and increase compliance behaviour in cases of crisis (Stephens et al., 2013 ). Inconsistent messages on the other hand were found to cause misperception and confusion, leading to a non-compliant behaviour by the recipients. The content of the message as well as its tone is also an important indicator of whether the recipients will comply or not (Sutton et al., 2013 ). Sources of crisis communication, such as leaders and public health officials, are perceived to be reliable and trustworthy when they exhibit concern and care (Heath and O’ Hair, 2010 ). In addition, they can be more effective in building relationship with the public, if they consider the cultural factors that play a role in their communicating about risks (Aldoory, 2010 ).
Boin et al. ( 2016 ) argue that crisis communication is one of the key challenges, which leaders face during a crisis situation. During crisis communication, leaders are required to frame ‘meaning’ of the crisis in order to shape how public perceives the risks, consequences and how they respond to the measures being taken. Developing a persuasive narrative in communication is thus integral to succesful framing of the crisis and for a strategic leadership. The construction of a successful persuasive narrative requires five frame functions: namely that the narrative will offer a credible explanation of what happened, it will provide guidance, instil hope, show empathy, and suggest that leaders are in control (Boin et al., 2016 ). In doing so, leaders aid the public’s understanding of the facts associated with crisis while sumltaneously acknolwedging and appealing to collective emotions. In incorporating these frame functions, leaders are posed with various choices and decision-making such as how they choose to or not choose to dramatise the situation, the language that they use and how they appeal to the colleactive emotions and stress.
As digital media technologies became popular resources for getting and spreading information, public officials and leaders also increasingly started using them as domains during the crises. In fact, for some scholars the use of social media while enabling mutual interaction between the leaders and recipients has altered the field of crisis communication altogether. For instance, it was found that as social media enables constant and effective communication, it was used more regularly than traditional media outlets during crisis (Kim and Liu, 2012 ). Similarly, Utz et al. ( 2013 ) discussed how for effective crisis communication strategy, the use of media channels, social media—Twitter, and Facebook—versus traditional— newspapers—was more critical than the type of the crisis. Moreover, Schultz et al. ( 2011 ) concluded that when compared to traditional media networks, crisis communication received less negative response when social media was used. Hence, it is not to our surprise that public officials nowadays are turning to social media platforms for communicating with the masses during crisis. They not only use these tools to communicate about crisis but also request information from the public. This was the case during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis where social media was employed by political leaders across the globe to mediate the communication of information about the pandemic as well as for reaching out to their citizens. This paper by focusing on the Norwegian case and more specifically on the Norwegian Prime Minister’s Facebook use during the time of COVID-19 pandemic aims to explore the use of social media platforms by political leaders during crisis. Our goal is to better understand how political leaders adapt social media technologies in their communication strategies during crises.
Our data that covers Erna Solberg’s Facebook posts between February 27, 2020, and February 10, 2021 (a total of 271 posts) were extracted from Footnote 2 into an Excel sheet. A total of 114 posts were removed as they were not related to COVID-19 leaving us 157 posts for further analysis. To aid the coding process, we noted the variables presented in Table 1 . These are: date, number of interactions, number, and type of reactions (e.g., angry, sad, like, etc.), URLs of links shared, and a description of the content of the posts that was later used in the qualitative analysis. We also noted if the posts were made during any particularly critical period (e.g., before, during or after new restrictive measures were introduced). The content of the posts and the number of likes and other reactions derived from this data should be considered a ‘snapshot’ of Solberg’s posts as they appeared at the time of data collection (Brügger, 2013 ), as it is possible that some posts have been subsequently removed, or that the numbers and types of reactions to the posts have changed by the publication date
The data was analysed through thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006 ): in the first step, we read all posts and generated the first set of codes. Next, we combined all the similar codes while labelling them in clusters and organised them into analytical themes/categories (see Fig. 1 ). The authors then discussed and reviewed these analytical themes and merged them into aggregate/conceptual themes. Lastly, we reviewed the aggregate themes through the lens of the five frame functions of persuasive narrative and identified commonalities and differences. We have included some posts under each theme to illustrate our analytical process and illuminate the themes (Sandelowski, 1994 ). All posts presented here were translated from Norwegian to English by the authors.
Schematic formulation of a theme from the categories captured in posts.
Our analysis resulted in five themes: (1) Promoting responsibility and togetherness (2) Coping (3) Being in control amidst uncertainty (4) Fostering hope and (5) Relating with the followers. In reviewing our findings from the framework of Boin et al. ( 2016 ), we found that all five frame functions of persuasive narrative were embedded in Solberg’s posts and aligned with our themes. Below we discuss our themes with reference to frame functions of Boin et al. ( 2016 ) for a persuasive narrative and in doing so, add contextual nuances to each theme.
Analysis of Solberg’s posts revealed a strong message of responsibility and togetherness. In almost all shares, she not only emphasized solidarity but also called for courage and responsibility. This Facebook post, shared soon after comprehensive shut-down measures were introduced, shows how important, for Solberg, was Norwegian solidarity expressed as ‘we’ (March 12, 2020):
Dear everyone. In times of crisis, we understand how dependent we are on each other. What unites us is more important than what separates us. This is not the time for ‘I’. This is the time for ‘we’.
Lunn et al. ( 2020 ) note that citizens are isolated during government induced or self-imposed quarantines: appeals to collective action and a spirit of ‘we-are-in-it-together’ are important ways to ensure compliance with quarantine and hence curb the rate of infection. Leaders in countries such New Zealand, UK, Brazil have also been found to have used a similar narrative emphasizing patriotic duty, love of country, and coming together as one, to mobilise community action (Dada et al., 2021 ).
Her posts were also imbued with appreciation and expression of gratitude towards healthcare workers and those who follow rules. For example, after introduction of the ban to travel to cabins and after the government’s decision to extend regulations until after Easter, Solberg posted the following on April 4, 2020, receiving a high number of likes:
I feel proud when I see how we handle this together. Many thanks to everyone who follows the advice from the health authorities. Many thanks to everyone in the health service who works hard and perseveres. Many thanks to all Norwegians for the patience, love and solidarity we now show each other
The use of the word ‘I’ and how it was being used in reference to ‘feel[ing] proud’, we argue, highlights the ‘positioning of self’ by Solberg. Davies and Harré ( 1990 ) claim that development of the notion of ‘positioning’ is a contribution to the understanding of personhood, and how speakers choose to position their personal identity vis-a-vis their discontinuous personal diversity (such as being the Prime Minister, politician, Norwegian citizen, etc.). In such posts, whether intentionally or unintentionally, we also see the discursive practices through which Solberg allocates meaning to her position as a Prime Minister by emphasising that she feels proud upon seeing those who follow advice. At the same time, her emphasis on ‘we’, as in how ‘ we handle this together’, places her as a member of the Norwegian masses.
Moreover, such references to togetherness and solidarity also reflect attempts to utilise the existing nationalistic cultural repertoire of the Norwegian concept of dugnad . For example, on New Year’s Day following the Gjerdrum community disaster (a sudden and unexpected mudslide that destroyed several residential houses) and rise in the number of infections during the holiday period (2125 reported cases on December 29, 2020), Solberg posted the following post:
[…] During the year we have put behind us, Norway has lined up for the big dugnad . People have put their interests and dreams on hold to protect the elderly and the risk groups. It has saved lives. I am deeply grateful, proud and touched, for the way the Norwegian people have handled the biggest challenge for our society since World War II. We lined up for each other when it mattered most…
Dugnad in Norwegian is voluntary work that is performed as a collective effort (Moss and Sandbakken, 2021 ). Nilsen and Skarpenes ( 2020 ) discuss how the concept of dugnad is embedded in a moral repertoire of the socially responsible citizen that is indicative of a specifically Norwegian welfare mentality and conclude that dugnad is imperative for the sustainability and resilience of the Norwegian welfare model. Before the pandemic, Simon and Mobekk ( 2019 ) argued that the concept of dugnad is central to Norwegian culture, inculcating prosocial and cooperative behaviour, and thereby plays a role in Norway being one of the most egalitarian democracies and having high levels of equality and reciprocity. In the context of COVID-19, social anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen ( 2020 ) pointed out that one reason for the success of the Norwegian approach was the mobilisation of broader society to fight COVID-19, driven by the notion of dugnad . Similarly, Moss and Sandbakken ( 2021 ) analysed data from press conferences and interviews with members of the public and found that many participants mentioned liking how the government talked of ‘a spirit of dugnad ’ ( dugnadsånd ), appealing to shared voluntary work rather than strict rules. The authors posit that in a pandemic it is crucial to create and use meta-narratives that are a good fit with the context in order to aid meaning-making and increase compliance. The use of dugnad as a cultural repertoire has, however, met with criticism from some scholars, who argue that ‘a word associated with solidarity, unity, and voluntary work obscures the forced nature of the measures’ (Tjora, 2020 ) and shifts the onus for finding solutions onto individual citizens or groups (Nilsen and Skarpenes, 2020 ; Hungnes, 2016 ).
Despite the criticism of imbibing such cultural repertoire, the alignment of the key values of Norwegian society with the core message of encouraging collective action is essential for a crisis narrative to be politically effective (Boin et al., 2016 ). Furthermore, the theme of ‘Promoting responsibility and togetherness’ shows the context specific nature of crisis communication narrative in the case of COVID-19 in Norway and therefore adds to the components for a persuasive narrative.
Solberg’s Footnote 3 posts also carried messages that address the consequences of coping with COVID-19, namely self-isolation, and loneliness. For instance, her posts guided followers in dealing with loneliness and maintaining general physical and mental health. The Norwegian government, like that of many other countries, had introduced measures such as mandatory quarantine and social distancing rules to manage the spread of the virus. Studies have shown that home confinement during COVID-19 has negatively affected the emotional state of individuals due to depression and anxiety and has led to or increased a sedentary lifestyle (Sang et al., 2020 ). Thus, emphasis on the well-being of the population during COVID-19 is important for effective crisis management (WHO, 2020a ) because increased well-being would reinforce its coping abilities during illness and hardships. As these are not the direct effects of the COVID-19 infection, but a result of the contagion containment measures imposed on citizens by the government, we observe Solberg taking responsibility and providing solutions to help. In doing so, she appears sensitive and caring towards the public.
Christensen and Lægreid ( 2020 ) attribute the ‘high-performing’ handling of the pandemic in Norway to the initial focus on suppression, followed by a control strategy. The authors further examine the ideas that having successful communication with the public, a collaborative and pragmatic decision-making style, the country’s resourcefulness, and high trust of government all contributed to the relative success in Norway. Adopting the correct and effective strategy indeed heavily influences the outcomes of crises. However, to fill the ‘cognitive void’ that the public might be experiencing, leaders need to manage the meaning-making process and ensure legitimacy of their actions (Boin et al., 2016 ). Solberg and the other ministers played an important role in communicating with citizens and the media through daily media briefings together with the NDH (Norwegian Directorate of Health) and NIPH (Norwegian Institute of Public Health) (Christensen and Lægreid, 2020 )
Solberg emphasized the impact of loneliness, for example, during one of the first holiday periods during the pandemic when comprehensive shut-down measures were introduced, she wrote:
Many people may feel lonely during holidays such as Easter, and the corona crisis exacerbates this. Therefore, I would like to encourage everyone to call someone you know is alone at Easter. The little things can mean a lot. Happy Easter!
A study by Blix et al. ( 2021 ) on the topic of mental health in the Norwegian population during the COVID-19 pandemic found that a substantial proportion of the population experienced significant psychological distress in the early phases. More than one out of four reported ongoing psychological distress over the threshold for clinically significant symptoms. Two other categories of individuals (those recently exposed to violence and those with pre-existing mental health problems) were found to be at special risk but worrying about the consequences of the pandemic was also found to contribute negatively to mental health. In this regard, Shah et al. ( 2020 ) argued that several nations have failed to address the mental health aspect among the public, as far more effort is being focused on understanding the epidemiology, clinical features, transmission patterns, and management of COVID-19. Solberg’s open discussion about mental health during the pandemic implies a situation-specific and data-driven strategy of managing the less visible effects of the pandemic and show insight in anticipating future needs (Han et al., 2020 ).
Moreover, Solberg’s posts also subtly utilised the Norwegian concept of friluftsliv , which translates as ‘free air life,’ a philosophy of outdoor living and connection with nature (Henderson and Vikander 2007 ). Friluftsliv is associated with grand narratives of Norwegian national identity depicting outdoor adventures, foraging, and a deep connection to nature (Jørgensen-Vittersø, 2021 ). For example, with the re-opening of DNT [Den Norske Turistforening] cabins in mid-2020, Solberg in her post on June 11 emphasized the importance of being outdoors in fresh air:
We need to use our bodies and get out into the light and fresh air. It is important for both physical and mental health! I hope many have a good and active Norwegian holiday this year!
In these posts, Solberg also shared pictures of herself being outdoors. In such ways, Solberg appeared to be offering not only guidance for coping with the challenges and consequences of living during the pandemic, but also emphasizing one characteristic of the Norwegian culture, which they are proud of—spending time in nature. Be it advice to spend time in nature, or to keep social distance or self-isolation, we consider that Solberg’s approach to coping aligns with the frame function of ‘offering guidance’. During a crisis, leaders have a window of opportunity during which they can communicate a frame to not only make sense of the crisis but also to provide guidance and to portray themselves as attentive and concerned about the challenging circumstances faced by the public (Boin et al., 2016 ). By depicting herself as attuned to the emotions experienced by her followers during the pandemic and by utilising the moment to suggest ways of coping, Solberg’s communication encapsulates the frame function of offering guidance for a persuasive narrative.
In her posts, Solberg presented a narrative of being in control amidst uncertainty, which aligns with two of the frame functions of Boin et al. ( 2016 ), namely offering a credible explanation and suggesting that leaders are in control. In times of a crisis, it is important that leaders do not downplay the gravity of the situation or claim unrealistically optimistic scenarios (Boin et al., 2016 ). We see that Solberg maintained a balance by providing a detailed explanation of her actions and the reasons behind the restrictive measures taken. At the same time, she acknowledged the uncertainty inherent in the ever-changing crisis and demonstrated her concern. According to Lunn et al. ( 2020 ), in situations characterised by uncertainty and fear, responsible leaders need to signal that they are in control of the situation, which can be demonstrated by making decisions with confidence and honesty. Moreover, it is also essential that leaders do not make promises that are impossible or unrealistic, because doing that can impede the persuasiveness of their narrative by affecting their credibility later (Boin et al., 2016 ). In Solberg’s posts, we see that she displays confidence but also the reality of uncertainty and concern, which is a sign of effective leadership and shows ‘bounded optimism’ (Brassey and Kruyt, 2020 ). The following post where she writes about her worries and concerns followed by advice is a good example of credibility and control:
I am worried. Right now, we have ongoing outbreaks in Bergen, Oslo, Trondheim and Hammerfest… We know that vigorous work is being done intensively in these municipalities with infection detection and other measures. Although Norway has relatively low infection rates, we also register here at home that the number of hospital admissions and the number of infected have increased recently. We now have the highest number of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 since May… We also see that the infection has begun to spread to older age groups. And there is a significant risk that the numbers will continue to rise as we see in Europe. That is why we have today announced new national austerity measures next week. We can still reverse the trend here at home…
A demonstration of concern from role models has been shown to have a role in persuading the public to adhere to recommendations (Simon and Mobekk, 2019 ). Tannenbaum et al. ( 2015 ) note that fear is easier to handle when it is acknowledged, which relates to the idea of ‘citizens being anxious enough to take the advice from the authorities to heart and optimistic enough as to feel that their actions make a difference’ (Petersen, 2020 ). Inculcating ‘optimistic anxiety’ (Tannenbaum et al., 2015 ) is therefore an important feature of crisis communication narratives.
Another important nuance that emerges from Solberg’s posts is her comparisons to other countries to draw attention to the seriousness of the situation. For example, on November 5, 2020, Solberg made the following post announcing new national measures, which received over 5000 likes:
My message to the Norwegian people is: Stay at home as much as possible. Have the least possible social contact with others. It is absolutely necessary to avoid a new shutdown. Norway is at the beginning of the second wave of infection… The virus is spreading rapidly and all counties now have outbreaks. The government is therefore introducing new national infection control measures… If the current rate of infection continues, the number of inpatients in intensive care units will increase sharply in the coming weeks. This will lead to less intensive capacity for other seriously ill people. We are now where the Netherlands was at the beginning of September. A very rapid increase in infection in the Netherlands quickly led to more patients in the intensive care unit… Other European countries have similar experiences. There is therefore a heavy seriousness about the situation. And we must take responsibility together
By giving detailed reasoning behind measures being taken amidst uncertainty, Solberg exhibits both confidence and honesty in her narratives (Lunn et al., 2020 ). Another key feature that emerges from the post above is the emphasis on the risks of an increase in infection, and the possibility of a new lockdown and overburdening of intensive care capacity, thereby reflecting a more strongly persuasive intent. Such emphasis on the risks is different from other posts where Solberg exhibits control and optimism much more strongly. This adaption from a communicative stance to a more persuasive one could result from not only the perceived severity of the situation, but also the perceived risks of pandemic fatigue. Pandemic fatigue has been defined by the WHO as a lack of motivation to adhere to recommended protective behaviours (WHO, 2020b ). According to surveys conducted in different countries, most people have been shown to possess adequate knowledge of COVID-19 and the precautions required to keep safe, yet factors like emotions and context have been found to have greater impact on behaviours than knowledge (Gavi the Vaccine Alliance, 2020 ). A study of different ways of communicating healthcare messages suggested that believability of the messages and the recipients’ reactions to them can be influenced by the persuasive intent (Wang and Shen, 2019 ). Koh et al. ( 2020 ) also discuss the importance of devising effective and successful communications for a sustained period without message fatigue setting in, which includes concern for the way the communication is framed. Overall, we see that Solberg’s posts provide a rationale with portrayal of the government being in control of managing the crisis.
Solberg’s posts also emphasized the hopeful aspects of the crisis by appealing to followers to look forward to a return to everyday life, and new educational and economic prospects, despite the difficult current circumstances. This theme aligns with the frame of ‘instilling hope’ as per frame functions for a persuasive narrative by Boin et al. ( 2016 ). During a crisis, more than ever, effective leaders embody the hopes and fears of the society under threat, and therefore they should strive to inculcate optimism of a better future (Boin et al., 2016 ). Previous research has documented that in times of turmoil, followers especially look up to leadership that serves as a beacon of hope for and faith in a positive future, more than they do in times of prosperity (Stam et al., 2018 ; Shamir et al., 1993 ). According to Boin et al., leadership during crisis always has a moral dimension. On January 10, 2021, by which time Norway had witnessed over 50000 cases of infection and over 400 deaths as well as the Gjerdrum disaster, Solberg made the following post:
Dear everyone. This year I hope we can take our dreams back. After a year of pandemic and fear. Then I look forward to seeing creativity unleashed…
Another post that emphasized the optimism for educational prospects was made on April 15, 2020, and drew over 5000 likes:
Today is the last deadline to apply to a vocational school, college or university. I understand that it can feel strange to apply for an education this autumn while the educational institutions keep their campuses closed. Maybe someone also thinks the idea of moving from home to a new city seems extra scary these days. To you I want to say that everyday life will return. Therefore, my appeal to you who want to study: do not put your life on hold, but apply for education this year!
Lessons from previous crises tell us that leaders need to pay attention to the fear of the ongoing threat, as well as sadness and grief, and to provide hope to mitigate social disruption (Maak et al., 2021 ). Here, we see that Solberg’s is attempting to convey hope while also acknowledging the challenges and impact of COVID-19. In doing so, the messages also emphasise self-efficacy and trust in the government. Hope and resilience are closely aligned constructs, as they both include a tendency towards maintaining an optimistic outlook in the face of adversity (Duggal et al., 2016 ). Thus, fostering hope during crisis can help the community cope with the consequences of the crisis. Moreover, by using emotional appeals, leaders can influence attitudes and behaviours as well as induce compassion (Ghio et al., 2020 ).
The theme of fostering hope in Solberg’s posts was found to be particularly emphasized during and before national holidays or important events. Her posts often utilised humour to foster positivity, particularly during critical periods such as during or after implementation of stricter COVID-19 measures. For example, a day after it was announced that infection-reduction measures would continue throughout Christmas, Solberg shared a snipped of her response to a question asked in a press conference and posted:
Can Santa actually come to visit this year?
Creating human moments and hope is a sign of compassionate leadership and helps to establish the relational foundation for widespread support for pandemic control measures (Maak et al., 2021 ). Also, by utilising humour, Solberg adapts the tone of her messages, a tactic that has been found to significantly affect audiences’ attitudes and behaviours, help people manage their emotions, and strengthen support for pandemic measures (Lee and Basnyat, 2013 )
The last theme is about the posts in which Solberg relates to the public by providing personal information, acknowledging, and relating with the difficult circumstances, and using humour or a private tone in her posts. For example, the post below was made just before Easter and it received more than 13000 likes, making it to be the third-most liked post of Solberg related to COVID-19 during this period.
It will be a different Easter this year. Let’s make the best of it. We can play fun board games with our loved ones, read the book we never have time to read, listen to an audiobook or explore the local area. The last few weeks have been challenging for all of us, but we want to get through this… Sindre and I have recharged with board games and wish you all a very happy Easter!
Empathy is an important component of the persuasive narrative, especially during crises when the decisions made by authorities to mitigate, and control can also have consequences for people’s lives. For crisis communication to be effective, the information provided to the public should not be too factual or portray leaders as distant from the citizens (Shen, 2010 ; Lunn et al., 2020 ). By demonstrating concern and acknowledging the impact of crises, leaders can empathise with the public (Shen, 2010 ; Lunn et al., 2020 ). We see Solberg personifying the challenges of COVID-19 by referring to how the times have been challenging for ‘all of us’. According to Boin et al. ( 2016 ), a leader’s personification of suffering is instrumental in showing empathy because the public is then able to relate to them.
Further, previously in a study by Larsson ( 2015 ) about Norwegian party leaders on Facebook during the 2013 ‘short campaign’, it was found that personal content referencing private life is increasingly employed by Norwegian party leaders. Enli and Rosenberg ( 2018 ) investigated voters’ evaluations of politicians as authentic or ‘real,’ and Solberg was found to be one of the most perceived authentic politicians. Enli ( 2014 ) had earlier suggested that Erna Solberg’s public profile as predictable, anti-elitist and imperfect constructs her authenticity.
A similar example of relatability with followers during the pandemic was the instance when she forgot the rule of not shaking hands during public meetups and press conferences. After the event, she wrote:
It is important that we can have some humour in a difficult time Even a prime minister can forget, but now it is important that we all remember to follow the advice of the health authorities…
She also used an engaging communicative style when interacting with her followers:
Then the holiday is over… a different summer, a little cold, weekly meetings in the Government’s Corona Committee on video, beautiful nature experiences from Norway and a lot of rain. Let me share a wonderful little meeting with a lynx on the lawn on Varaldsøy… Have you had a nice summer?
Thus, Solberg embeds references to her private life, which also helps to personify the messages in her posts and thus relate with the public. In addition, by relating with the public on an everyday basis and through the acknowledgment of shared challenges during crisis, Solberg’s narrative also appears empathetic. Our theme of ‘Relating to the public’ thus encapsulates frame function of ‘showing empathy’ for developing a persuasive narrative, as per Boin et al. ( 2016 ).
This paper was an attempt to explore the Facebook posts of Norway’s Prime Minister Erna Solberg to highlight the key features of her crisis communication during the COVID-19 pandemic. By drawing on data from Solberg’s Facebook posts during the pandemic our analyses identified five major themes, (1) Promoting responsibility and togetherness (2) Coping (3) Being in control amidst uncertainty (4) Fostering hope and (5) Relating with the followers, where we went in detail explanation by using frame functions of a persuasive narrative by Boin et al. ( 2016 ). We furthermore discussed the specific Norwegian contextual nuances to the frame functions. These were the theme ‘Responsibilization and togetherness’, presented via the references to Norwegianness and the cultural concept and practice of dugnad . Hence, our paper showed how during crisis persuasive narratives are incorporated into the social media communication strategies of political leaders.
The paper also showed how persuasive narratives are delivered through praising the public’s efforts, promoting togetherness, caring about the public’s well-being, displaying optimism and confidence in the government’s measures. It elaborated on how crisis management on social media was done via the use of humour and personal information. Humour was used as a tool to engage with the public and help them relate and comply to the COVID-19 restrictions. Hence, Solberg used Facebook to capitalise on a wide-reaching social medium (Hallahan, 2010 ). While the communication of leaders during crises helps to fill the cognitive void, the use of social media helps build societal resilience by improving awareness and encouraging preparedness (Boin et al., 2016 )
Even so, the success of a persuasive narrative is to a great extent dependant on the credibility of its proponents (Boin et al., 2016 ). The reputation of the leader and the organisation that they represent plays a key role in framing a successful persuasive narrative. In general, Norwegians have more trust in each other and their institutions than most other countries (Skirbekk and Grimen, 2012 ). A survey conducted by the Norwegian Citizen’s Panel [Norsk Medborgerpanel] in March 2020 found that trust in government, in the health authorities, in parliament, and in national and local politicians had increased, as did trust in the Prime Minister during the pandemic (Dahl, 2020 ). Clearly, Solberg seems to have benefitted from the trust capital in Norwegian society with her Facebook communications during a crisis. More recently, Erna Solberg has received heavy criticism for breach of COVID-19 restrictions during a family trip to Geilo for her 60th birthday (The Guardian, 2021a ). Following which, Erna Solberg, has been investigated by police and fined (The Guardian, 2021b ). Thus, while her Facebook posts exhibiting components of a persuasive narrative received popularity, her actions have nevertheless been subjected to scrutiny and criticisms in mainstream media (Larsen, 2021 ). According to Boin et al. ( 2016 : p. 72), the retainment of confidence of the public is essential for the communication strategies to be effective. Therefore, such media criticism might undermine the credibility of Solberg and her cabinet, leading to less credible and politically ineffective narratives. On the other hand, past performances, and reputation also play an important role in increasing leaders’ personal credibility in the face of crisis (Boin et al., 2016 ). Consequently, Solberg’s long career in politics and her reputation of caring about the citizens as previously discussed, could buffer the recent impact on her credibility. Moreover, communication during and after a crisis affects long-term impressions (Coombs, 2007 ). With the personification of politics in Norway or ‘decentralising personalization’ (Balmas et al., 2014 ), the criticisms paved at Erna, however, reflect more of a personal crisis than a national crisis. And while we do not analyse Solberg’s posts beyond 9 th Feb. 2021 i.e., after Solberg spoke about the Geilo trip incident on her Facebook account, we see that she follows similar strategy in handling this personal crisis as the national crisis of COVID-19, through use of a persuasive narrative. Future studies can therefore focus on how Solberg and other political leaders utilise the strategy of persuasive narrative in management of personal crisis in nexus with national crisis such as that of COVID-19.
Further, we concur with Christensen and Lægreid ( 2020 ) who write that the ‘political leadership has succeeded well in connecting governance capacity and legitimacy using the argument that Norway had sufficient resources to deal with the crisis. While the health resource capacity and preparedness of Norway inarguably contributes to the outcomes of the crisis, communicating a successful persuasive narrative with credibility is integral to gaining legitimacy and filling the cognitive void (Boin et al., 2016 ). Erna Solberg’s use of persuasive narrative in Facebook posts, seems therefore to have been effective in the management of the COVID-19 pandemic, but her latest unfortunate incident goes to show how politicians’ management of crises is tenuous and highly dependent on public trust.
Our study adds to the significance and knowledge of how persuasive narratives are incorporated into the communication strategy of leaders on a social media platform and highlights the usefulness of this framework for studies about ongoing and future crises. By using data from social media, our findings also add to the understanding of the increased personification of politics and how leaders utilise this personification to communicate government measures and engage with the public during a crisis. Future research can further explore how public leaders and health authorities’ frame crises situations, actions, issues, and responsibility to dramatise and reinforce key ideas (Hallahan, 1999 ). Such insights can pave way for understanding public’s shaping of risk perceptions and compliance to behavioural measures during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
The dataset analysed during the current study is available through the public profile of Erna Solberg on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ernasolberg/ . This dataset was derived from Crowd Tangle which can be accessed through request at https://www.crowdtangle.com/ .
Known as ‘hyttetur’, cabin trips are deeply rooted in Norwegian culture and way of life
Crowdtangle extracts both historical and current data of post contents and metadata such as the date the post was made, number of likes, other reactions and shares. Information about how to access raw material included in this study can be found in the data availability statement at the end of the article.
‘Everything will be fine’ [ Alt blir bra ] was one of the campaigns that spread because of the COVID-19 crisis in Norway depicting pictures of a rainbow.
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This article is published as part of the research project ‘Fighting Pandemics with Enhanced Risk Communication: Messages, Compliance and Vulnerability During the COVID-19 Outbreak (PAN-FIGHT)’, which is financed by the Norwegian Research Council (Project number: 312767).
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Arora, S., Debesay, J. & Eslen-Ziya, H. Persuasive narrative during the COVID-19 pandemic: Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg’s posts on Facebook. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 9 , 35 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01051-5
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SEAR/PR/1744 New Delhi - Ten months into the pandemic, handwashing with soap remains one of our best defenses against the virus, along with other public health measures such as maintaining physical distance, avoiding crowded places, practising cough etiquette and wearing a mask wherever recommended.
Global Handwashing Day observed annually on October 15 to raise awareness and highlight the importance of handwashing as an effective means of disease prevention – this year marks a critical reminder for the world and the Region that this simple, cost effective practice can save lives.
‘Handwashing has always been one of most effective ways of keeping diseases at bay. It is a simple act that pays in dividends when it comes to keeping ourselves healthy and safe. Handwashing is also one of the key cornerstones of COVID-19 prevention. Now more than ever as we embrace the new normal and live with COVID-19, hand hygiene needs to become an integral part of our daily routine and our lives, as we live through this pandemic, and beyond, to protect us from diseases,’ said Dr Poonam Khetrapal Singh, Regional Director, WHO South-East Asia Region.
With COVID-19 transmission mainly spreading between people through direct, indirect (through contaminated objects or surfaces), or close contact with infected people via mouth and nose secretions, washing hands with soap and running water is of critical importance. To stop the spread of COVID-19, along with other COVID appropriate behaviours, the practice of handwashing at regular intervals is a must, after coughing or sneezing, when caring for the sick, after using the toilet, before eating, while preparing food and after handling animals or animal waste. Handwashing after touching common surfaces such as doorknobs or handles, or after one comes back home from visiting a public place will keep ourselves and others around us safe.
“Promoting hand hygiene at all levels of health care is also critical. Hand hygiene, a very simple action, is well accepted to be one of the primary modes of reducing health care-associated infection and of enhancing patient safety,” the Regional Director said.
The pandemic is still among us and it is far from over. We must remind ourselves of the basics that we as individuals can do to keep ourselves safe, she said.
This year’s Global Handwashing Day theme is Hand Hygiene for All and calls for all of society to achieve universal hand hygiene. To beat the virus today and ensure better health outcomes beyond the pandemic, handwashing with soap must be a priority now and in the future.
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Due to the downward trend in respiratory viruses in Maryland, masking is no longer required but remains strongly recommended in Johns Hopkins Medicine clinical locations in Maryland. Read more .
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The coronavirus that causes COVID-19 spreads primarily from person to person through respiratory droplets. This can happen when someone with the virus coughs, sneezes, sings or talks when close to others. By closely following a few safety measures, you can help protect yourself and others from getting sick.
Lisa Maragakis , senior director of infection prevention at Johns Hopkins, shares these guidelines:
Several COVID-19 vaccines have been approved or authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for emergency use among specific age groups and recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Johns Hopkins Medicine views all authorized COVID-19 vaccines as highly effective at preventing serious disease, hospitalization and death from COVID-19.
Learn more about coronavirus vaccine safety and COVID-19 boosters .
As more people get vaccinated, the rates of infection and hospitalization will vary in your area. For the foreseeable future, it’s a good idea to be familiar with the vaccination and COVID-19 data for your area and follow the local, state and federal safety guidelines.
The coronavirus spreads mainly from person to person. If an infected person coughs or sneezes, their droplets can infect people nearby. People, including children, may be infected and have only mild symptoms, so physical distancing (staying at least 6 feet apart from others) is an important part of coronavirus protection.
Wear a face mask in crowded, indoor situations since people carrying the SARS-CoV-2 virus and unvaccinated or vulnerable people might be present. Johns Hopkins Medicine and other health care institutions require all visitors, patients and staff to wear masks in all of their hospitals, treatment centers and offices. Learn more information about how masks help prevent the spread of COVID-19.
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Covid19 vaccines are one of the ways to prevent the spread of COVID-19, but they have been a source of controversy. Different sides argue about the benefits or dangers of the new vaccines. ... Writing a persuasive essay about COVID-19 requires a thoughtful approach to present your arguments effectively. Here are some tips to help you craft a ...
Answer 2: One must get the vaccine as soon as possible. Further, always wear a mask properly and sanitize or wash your hands. Clean or disinfect areas that people touch frequently like door handles, electronics, and more. Always cover your mouth when sneezing or coughing and maintain physical distancing.
If students submit their essay to a news outlet—and it's published—Cohan awards them with extra credit. As a result of this assignment, more than 25 students have had their work published in newspapers across the United States. Many of these essays cite and applaud the University's Keep Wes Safe campaign and its COVID-19 testing protocols.
Why wearing a mask is the most important thing we can do to stop the spread of COVID-19. 'Masks and face coverings can prevent the wearer from transmitting the COVID-19 virus to others and may provide some protection to the wearer.'. Messaging on the importance of wearing a mask during the pandemic has at times been confusing.
Read these 12 moving essays about life during coronavirus. Artists, novelists, critics, and essayists are writing the first draft of history. A woman wearing a face mask in Miami. Alissa Wilkinson ...
COVID-19 tests can help prevent the spread to others. You can use COVID-19 self-tests at home and get quick results whether or not you have symptoms. Wash your hands many times a day with soap and running water for at least 20 seconds. In general, this is a good practice to help prevent the spread of germs.
As COVID-19 continues to creep its way into each of our communities and impact the way we live and communicate, I find solace in the fact that we face what comes next together, as humanity. When the day comes that my generation is responsible for dealing with another crisis, I hope we can use this experience to remind us that moving forward ...
Look to the science of persuasion, says communications professor Dominique Brossard, PhD. Brossard is part of a new National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine group called the Societal Experts Action Network, or SEAN, whose recent report lays out research-based strategies to encourage COVID-19-mitigating behaviors.. Brossard says the changes must feel easy to do—and to repeat ...
Such articles convey messages from governors, public health experts, physicians, COVID-19 patients, and residents of outbreak areas, encouraging people to stay at home. This is the first study to examine which narrator's message is most persuasive in encouraging people to do so during the COVID-19 pandemic and social lockdown.
Students can choose to write a full-length college essay on the coronavirus or summarize their experience in a shorter form. To help students explain how the pandemic affected them, The Common App ...
By. Elizabeth Svoboda. Credit: Sam Falconer. When Robb Willer looks back on the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic — when leaders still had a chance to stop the virus from bringing the world to ...
Doing this helps improve the flow of your essay and keeps the reader's attention. If they never have to stop and wonder how you got to a certain point, then you can keep all their attention purely on your argument. Step 6: Make It Applicable. As you bring your essay to a close, most persuasive papers end with some call to action.
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on individuals, societies, and economies worldwide. Its multifaceted nature presents a wealth of topics suitable for academic exploration. This essay provides guidance on developing engaging and insightful essay topics related to COVID-19, offering a comprehensive range of perspectives to choose from.
Here we use two survey experiments to study how persuasive messaging affects COVID-19 vaccine uptake intentions. In the first experiment, we test a large number of treatment messages. One subgroup of messages draws on the idea that mass vaccination is a collective action problem and highlighting the prosocial benefit of vaccination or the ...
Second, make the message positive. "Since we are asking people to be isolated, and it's not seen as a positive thing for most people, what we can do is frame that isolation in terms of ...
Persuasive appeals were manipulated using promotional flyers ostensibly distributed by the Public Health Agency of Canada. In the control condition, the flyer contained a simple list of what participants can do to help prevent the spread of COVID-19. ... "I owe it to my family to do whatever I can to stop the spread of COVID-19" (1=strongly ...
First, we conduct a large-scale multi-mes-sage study of different messages designed to encourage COVID-19 risk reduction actions with multiple outcomes followed by a replication study of the most promising messages. Testing a large number of messages means we can directly assess the relative effectiveness of different messages, decompose ...
This paper offers three important contributions. First, we conduct a large-scale multi-message study of different messages designed to encourage COVID-19 risk reduction actions with multiple outcomes followed by a replication study of the most promising messages.
Persuading people to engage in specific health behaviors is critical to prevent the spread of and mitigate the harm caused by COVID-19. Most of the research and practice around this issue focuses on developing effective message content.
Drawing inspiration from Boin, Stern and Sundelius', work on persuasive narratives, this study shows the ways that Solberg's posts about COVID-19 exhibit all five identified frame functions.
Minimizing contact with others by staying home and practicing social distancing can help health systems better meet the needs of those who may have COVID-19. While many people are following recommendations by working from home and canceling trips, others view these precautions as an overreaction. As the need for people to stay home and practice ...
To stop the spread of COVID-19, along with other COVID appropriate behaviours, the practice of handwashing at regular intervals is a must, after coughing or sneezing, when caring for the sick, after using the toilet, before eating, while preparing food and after handling animals or animal waste. Handwashing after touching common surfaces such ...
Staying Safe from COVID-19. The coronavirus that causes COVID-19 spreads primarily from person to person through respiratory droplets. This can happen when someone with the virus coughs, sneezes, sings or talks when close to others. By closely following a few safety measures, you can help protect yourself and others from getting sick.