Don’t get it or don’t spread it: Comparing self-interested versus prosocial motivations for COVID-19 prevention behaviors
Open accessAbstract
COVID-19 prevention behaviors may be seen as self-interested or prosocial. Using American samples from MTurk and Prolific (total n = 6,850), we investigated which framing is more effective—and motivation is stronger—for fostering prevention behavior intentions. We evaluated messaging that emphasized personal, public, or personal and public benefits of prevention. In initial studies (conducted March 14-16, 2020), the Public treatment was more effective than the Personal treatment, and no less effective than the Personal+Public treatment. In additional studies (conducted April 17-30, 2020), all three treatments were similarly effective. Across all these studies, the perceived public threat of coronavirus was also more strongly associated with prevention intentions than the perceived personal threat. Furthermore, people who behaved prosocially in incentivized economic games years before the pandemic had greater prevention intentions. Finally, in a field experiment (conducted December 21-23, 2020), we used our three messaging strategies to motivate contact-tracing app signups (n = 152,556 newsletter subscribers). The design of this experiment prevents strong causal inference; however, the results provide suggestive evidence that the Personal+Public treatment may have been more effective than the Personal or Public treatment. Together, our results highlight the importance of prosocial motives for COVID-19 prevention.
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Recent studies show that prosocial (vs. self-interest) message framing is effective in individualist countries in encouraging preventative behaviors.
“recent studies show that such message framing is effective in individualist countries in encouraging preventative behaviors (Jordan et al., 2020).”
From Understanding user responses to the COVID-19 pandemic on Twitter from a terror management theory perspective: Cultural differences among the US, UK and India (2022) · cites this paper as Jordan et al., 2020
The results passage on Studies 1 and 2 reports that prosocial framing was more effective than self-interested framing at increasing prevention intentions, and the Discussion identifies the United States as a fairly individualist culture (pages not provided). But the Discussion says the experiments mostly measured self-reported intentions, not actual behavior; its evidence for changing behavior is only suggestive. The claim overstates the evidence if “encouraging preventative behaviors” means changing what people did. (LLM, conf=0.84)
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Impact of community masking on COVID-19: a cluster-randomized trial in Bangladesh
Abaluck, J., Kwong, L. H., Styczynski, A., Haque, A., Kabir, M. A., Bates-Jefferys, E., Crawford, E., Benjamin-Chung, J., Raihan, S., Rahman, S., et al. (2022) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.abi9069 · Cited by 333 · see citing works
Prosociality predicts health behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic
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COVID-19 protective behaviors are forms of prosocial and unselfish behaviors
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- Authors
- Jordan, J., Yoeli, E., & Rand, D. G.
- Affiliations
- Harvard University (US)
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)
- Corresponding author
- Jordan, Jillian
- Venue
- Scientific Reports
- Publisher
- Center for Open Science
- Published
- 2020-04-03
- Volume
- 11
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 20222-20222
- ISSN
- 2045-2322 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC8511002
- OpenAlex
- W3097856151
- Cited by
- 348
- References
- 1
- Citations by year
- 2026: 17 · 2025: 23 · 2024: 35 · 2023: 59 · 2022: 84 · 2021: 86 · 2020: 44
- FWCI
- 78.87
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- Scientific Reports (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- DSpace@MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion)
- PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Communication › Communication and COVID-19 Impact
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › COVID-19 Prevention and Impact
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Applied Psychology › Behavioral Health and Interventions
- Keywords
- COVID-19 prevention behavior, prosocial motivation, framing effects, public health communication, threat perception, economic games
- MeSH terms
- COVID-19, Adult, Female, Humans, Male, Motivation, Social Behavior, United States, Contact Tracing, Pandemics, Mobile Applications
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