Using Short Messages to Encourage COVID-19 Prevention Behaviors

Controlling the spread of COVID-19 requires persuading the mass public to change their behavior in significant ways. Many efforts to encourage behavior change, such as public service announcements, social media posts, and billboards, involve short, persuasive appeals, yet the effectiveness of these messages is unknown. Here, we test whether short messages increase intentions to comply with public health guidelines. Research was conducted in the United States from March-July 2020. To identify promising messages, we conducted two pretests (total N = 1,596) where participants rated the persuasiveness of 56 unique messages: 31 based on the persuasion and social influence literature and 25 from a pool of 600 crowdsourced messages by online respondents. The four top-rated messages emphasized 1) civic responsibility to reciprocate the sacrifices of health care workers, 2) caring for the elderly and vulnerable, 3) a specific, sympathetic victim, and 4) limited health care system capacity. We then conducted three well-powered, pre-registered experiments (total N = 3,719) testing whether these four top-rated messages and a standard public health message based on language from the CDC increased intentions to comply with public health guidelines. In Study 1, we find the four messages and the standard public health message significantly outperformed a null control. In Studies 2 and 3, we compared the effects of persuasive messages to the standard public health message, finding that none consistently out-performed the standard public health message. Short messages can increase intentions to comply with public health guidelines, but short messages featuring persuasive techniques from the social science literature did not substantially outperform standard public health messages.