The effect of spokesperson attribution on public health message sharing during the COVID-19 pandemic

Ahmad M. Abu-Akel · Andreas Spitz · Robert West

64 citations0/0 files storedPLoS ONE

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Communication and COVID-19 Impact Public Relations and Crisis Communication Media Influence and Health

Abstract

It is urgent to understand how to effectively communicate public health messages during the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous work has focused on how to formulate messages in terms of style and content, rather than on who should send them. In particular, little is known about the impact of spokesperson selection on message propagation during times of crisis. We report on the effectiveness of different public figures at promoting social distancing among 12,194 respondents from six countries that were severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic at the time of data collection. Across countries and demographic strata, immunology expert Dr. Anthony Fauci achieved the highest level of respondents' willingness to reshare a call to social distancing, followed by a government spokesperson. Celebrity spokespersons were least effective. The likelihood of message resharing increased with age and when respondents expressed positive sentiments towards the spokesperson. These results contribute to the development of evidence-based knowledge regarding the effectiveness of prominent official and non-official public figures in communicating public health messaging in times of crisis. Our findings serve as a reminder that scientific experts and governments should not underestimate their power to inform and persuade in times of crisis and underscore the crucial importance of selecting the most effective messenger in propagating messages of lifesaving information during a pandemic.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 64 citations exist upstream.

References

1975How To Do Things With Words 2020Using social and behavioural science to support COVID-19 pandemic response 1990Persuasion theory and research 2010Demographic and attitudinal determinants of protective behaviours during a pandemic: A review 2013Global health 2035: a world converging within a generation 2006Best Practices in Crisis Communication: An Expert Panel Process 2017Psychological targeting as an effective approach to digital mass persuasion 2020Changes in risk perception and self-reported protective behaviour during the first week of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States

Cited by

2023COVID-19 vaccine communication and advocacy strategy: a social marketing campaign for increasing COVID-19 vaccine uptake in South Korea 2021Trust In Governments And Health Workers Low Globally, Influencing Attitudes Toward Health Information, Vaccines 2022A content analysis of Canadian influencer crisis messages on Instagram and the public’s response during COVID-19 2023Communicating COVID-19 Risk on Instagram: A Content Analysis of Official Public Health Messaging During the First Year of the Pandemic

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.