JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Public health campaigns to curb the spread of COVID-19 are important in reducing its spread but backlash to traditional information-based campaigns has been unexpectedly extreme.

Objective:

To understand if customizing public service announcements (PSAs) providing health guidelines that are customized to individuals’ identities increase compliance.

Methods:

We conducted a cross-sectional randomly controlled within- and between-subjects online experiment with 292 participants. Participants viewed two PSA, one advocating wearing a mask in public settings and one staying at home. The control PSA provided information only, and the treatment PSA was designed to appeal to the identities held by individuals, either a Christian identity or an economics identity. We recruited 300 social media users from Amazon Mechanical Turk following usual protocols to ensure data quality. Participants were asked about their identity and then received a control PSA and treatment PSA matching their identity in random order. The PSAs were about 100 words in length. The identity-based PSA changed the source of the PSA and inserted a phrase of about a dozen words relevant to the identity.

Results:

A PSA tailored for Christians, when matched with a Christian identity, increased the likelihood of complying by 12 percentage points (P=.013) A PSA that focused on economics, when shown to individuals who identified with the economy, increased the likelihood of complying by 6 points (P=.019).

Conclusions:

Using social media to deliver COVID-19 public health announcements customized to individuals’ identities is a promising way to increase compliance with public health guidelines.