Miguel Torres flexes after a Los Angeles County Department of Public Health nurse gives him a COVID-19 booster at Comic Con in Los Angeles in 2022. New studies show that effective trust messaging emphasizes community vaccination numbers rather than vaccine hesitancy.
Photo by Hans Gutknecht, courtesy Los Angeles Daily News/Getty Images
Researchers have found a simple way to help nudge people toward getting their vaccinations: Let them know how many others in their community plan to do so.
In the face of misinformation and overreporting on vaccine hesitancy, people tend to underestimate how many others are receiving vaccinations. But once they encounter public health messaging that accurately reports the percentage of people who plan to get vaccines, they are more willing to do so themselves, two recent global studies find.
The studies — published in January in Nature Communications and in May in Nature Human Behavior — were based on data from an online survey that ran on Facebook from July 2020 to March 2021. The survey was designed to assess people’s knowledge about COVID-19 and preventive behaviors. Over 2 million people from 67 countries responded.
When the actual number of people who planned to receive a COVID-19 vaccine was compared to how many people survey-takers thought would get vaccinated, there was a shortfall of at least 10%.
But when study participants were given accurate information about how many others in their community actually intended to get vaccinated, some people who were hesitant or opposed to vaccination changed their mind, equating to an increase of five percentage points, the studies found.
One of the reasons people overestimate vaccine hesitancy is because the media tends to focuses on people who are hesitant, according to Avinash Collis, PhD, MBE, a coauthor of both studies and an assistant professor at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas-Austin. Focusing on people who are positive about being vaccinated would increase uptake.
When people know that the majority of their community already received or is going to receive a vaccine, “they feel safer,” Collis said in a news release. “That’s the main takeaway — that information campaigns informing people about vaccination norms in their community can increase vaccination uptake.”
Based on the findings, researchers suggested that health communicators focus less on negativity and more on community norms, among other tactics. Researchers also emphasized the need for using a range of interventions that lower barriers to vaccination, reminding people to get vaccinated and spreading information about how to obtain a vaccine.
For more information on the survey and its data, which have been used in more than 40 papers, visit https://covidsurvey.mit.edu.
- Copyright The Nation’s Health, American Public Health Association
