The effectiveness of moral messages on public health behavioral intentions during the COVID-19 pandemic

With the COVID-19 pandemic threatening millions of lives, changing our behaviors to prevent the spread of the disease is a moral imperative. Here, we investigated the persuasiveness of messages inspired by three major moral traditions. A sample of US participants representative for age, sex and race/ethnicity (N=1032) viewed messages from either a leader or citizen containing deontological, virtue-based, utilitarian, or non-moral justifications for adopting social distancing behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic. We measured the messages’ effects on participants’ self-reported intentions to wash hands, avoid social gatherings, self-isolate, and share health messages, as well as their beliefs about others’ intentions, impressions of the messenger’s morality and trustworthiness, and beliefs about personal control and responsibility for preventing the spread of disease. Consistent with our pre-registered predictions, compared to non-moral control messages, deontological arguments had a modest effect on intentions to share the message. Message source (leader vs. citizen) did not moderate any of the observed effects of message type. A majority of participants predicted the utilitarian message would be most effective, but we found no evidence that the utilitarian message was effective in changing intentions or beliefs. We caution that our findings require confirmation in replication studies and are modest in size, likely due to ceiling effects on our measures of behavioral intentions and strong heterogeneity across all dependent measures along several demographic dimensions including age, self-identified gender, self-identified race, political conservatism, and religiosity. Although we found no evidence that the utilitarian message was effective in changing intentions and beliefs, exploratory analyses showed that individual differences in one key dimension of utilitarianism—impartial concern for the greater good—were strongly and positively associated with public health intentions and beliefs. Overall, our preliminary results suggest that public health messaging focused on duties and responsibilities toward family, friends and fellow citizens is a promising approach for future studies of interventions to slow the spread of COVID-19 in the US. Ongoing work is investigating the reproducibility and generalizability of our findings across different populations, what aspects of deontological messages may drive their persuasive effects, and how such messages can be most effectively delivered across global populations.