Vaccine for Yourself, Your Community, or Your Country? Examining Audiences' Response to Distance Framing of COVID-19 Vaccine Messages

"As message tailoring is an important strategy to make health communication persuasive, this study adds value to guide culture-driven messages on other vaccine promotion in the future."

Vaccination campaigns often focus on enhancing public knowledge of vaccine safety and effectiveness. However, simply providing information about the vaccine may not be sufficient to increase the vaccination rate. Thus, many campaign strategies draw on the health belief model, which suggests that people engage in health behaviours to avoid risk and increase benefit. This study explored the effects of COVID-19 vaccine promotion messages highlighting the benefit at individual, community, and country levels. Based on the cultural theory of risks, the researchers also investigated how individuals' valuation of individualism vs. communitarianism and hierarchical vs. egalitarian social structure affects their responses to vaccine messages.

An online experiment with four video message conditions (individual-centred, community-centred, country-centred, and no message) was conducted in March 2021. The research team created three videos encouraging viewers to get vaccinated with the COVID-19 vaccine when it becomes available to them: The individual-centred message focuses on the benefit of the vaccine on protecting themselves; the community-centred message stresses the vaccine's ability to protect the community in which the viewers live; and the country-centred message illustrates the country-level benefit of the COVID-19 vaccine. The participants, 702 residents of the United States (US), were randomly assigned to view one message.

Participants were also asked about their cultural cognition worldview, measured on scales of individual-communitarianism and hierarchy-egalitarianism through questions such as, "the government should do more to advance society's goals, even if that means limiting the freedom and choices of individuals" and "the government should put limits on the choices individuals can make so they don't get in the way of what's good for society". Participants also reported their willingness to receive COVID-19 vaccines and support for vaccine mandates.

The study found that the individual-centred message was in general more persuasive than the other frames, while a community-centred message was less so. No significant effect was observed with a country-centred message. (The possible reason is that as each state in the US issues its policy and regulation regarding the COVID-19 vaccine, the mitigation towards COVID-19 is scaled at the state level.)

The results also show that cultural cognition plays an important role in decisions regarding the COVID-19 vaccine. Specifically, emphasising the personal benefit of the COVID-19 vaccine appealed more to those upholding individualistic values. Also, the significant positive interaction between the community-centred message and hierarchical worldview suggests that individuals upholding egalitarian values were more likely to get vaccinated and support vaccine mandates than those who prefer a hierarchical social structure when viewing a community-centred message.

In conclusion, the results point to the importance of understanding audiences' worldviews when developing health promotion messages. By assessing worldviews by, for example, considering message recipients' sociocultural background or political ideology, health communicators can convey vaccines' benefits, and respond to public concerns over risks, more effectively.