TY - JOUR
T1 - How College Students React to COVID Vaccine PSAs
T2 - An Experimental Investigation
AU - Fridkin, Kim
AU - Horsting, Trudy
AU - Brown, Anastasia L.
AU - Williams, Alexandra M.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2023.
PY - 2023
Y1 - 2023
N2 - We explore how political and psychological factors condition the effectiveness of PSAs promoting COVID-19 vaccines. Targeting college students, we utilize a pretest-posttest experiment to examine how different PSAs (emotional, informational, and humorous) influence students’ emotional reactions and assessments of the PSAs. Further, we assess whether the PSAs are able to influence learning and persuasion. We find certain PSAs are more effective at changing people’s attitudes about the COVID-19 vaccine and the impact of these messages depends on people’s political and psychological predispositions. The informational PSA produces learning, regardless of students’ receptivity to pro-vaccine messaging. However, the humorous and emotional PSAs encourages learning only for those who are already receptive to the vaccine. These findings have implications for future public health campaigns aimed at college students, suggesting PSA campaigns developed to battle new health crises should be launched quickly before people develop strong attitudes about the emerging crisis.
AB - We explore how political and psychological factors condition the effectiveness of PSAs promoting COVID-19 vaccines. Targeting college students, we utilize a pretest-posttest experiment to examine how different PSAs (emotional, informational, and humorous) influence students’ emotional reactions and assessments of the PSAs. Further, we assess whether the PSAs are able to influence learning and persuasion. We find certain PSAs are more effective at changing people’s attitudes about the COVID-19 vaccine and the impact of these messages depends on people’s political and psychological predispositions. The informational PSA produces learning, regardless of students’ receptivity to pro-vaccine messaging. However, the humorous and emotional PSAs encourages learning only for those who are already receptive to the vaccine. These findings have implications for future public health campaigns aimed at college students, suggesting PSA campaigns developed to battle new health crises should be launched quickly before people develop strong attitudes about the emerging crisis.
KW - COVID-19
KW - college students
KW - emotions
KW - psychological predispositions
KW - vaccines
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85179684773&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85179684773&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/1532673X231220650
DO - 10.1177/1532673X231220650
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85179684773
SN - 1532-673X
VL - 52
SP - 203
EP - 224
JO - American Politics Research
JF - American Politics Research
IS - 3
ER -