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Category: Project

Description: In the COVID-19 pandemic, human solidarity plays a crucial role to meet this maybe greatest modern societal challenge. Public health communication targets to enhance collective compliance with protective health and safety regulations. Here, we asked whether authoritarian/ controlling message framing as compared to a neutral control framing may be more effective than moralizing/prosocial message framing, and whether recipients’ self-rated trait autonomy might lessen these effects. In a German representative sample (N = 708), we measured approval to seven regulations (e.g. reducing contacts, wearing a mask) before and after presenting one of three Twitter messages (authoritarian, moralizing, control) presented either by a high authority sender (state secretary), or a low authority sender (social worker). We found that overall, the messages successfully increased participants’ endorsement of the regulations, but only weakly so because of ceiling effects. High autonomous participants showed more consistent responding across the two measurements, in line with concepts of reactive autonomy. Specifically, when the sender was a social worker, response shifting correlated negatively with trait autonomy. We suggest that a trusted sender encourages more variable responding to imposed societal regulations, and discuss several aspects by which future surveys of this kind may improve data quality.