Refine
Document Type
- Article (2)
Language
- English (2)
Has Fulltext
- yes (2)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (2)
Keywords
- Affective conflict (1)
- COVID-19 (1)
- Cognitive control (1)
- Facial expressions (1)
- Feedback (1)
- Group membership (1)
- Prevention (1)
- Processing conflict account (1)
- Visualization (1)
Institute
- Institut für Psychologie (2) (remove)
Publisher
- Elsevier (2) (remove)
Background
To slow down the spread of COVID-19, the observance of basic hygiene measures, and physical distancing is recommended. Initial findings suggest that physical distancing in particular can prevent the spread of COVID-19.
Objectives
To investigate how information to prevent the spread of infectious diseases should be presented to increase willingness to comply with preventive measures.
Methods
In a preregistered online experiment, 817 subjects were presented with either interactively controllable graphics on the spread of COVID-19 and information that enable them to recognize how much the spread of COVID-19 is reduced by physical distancing (experimental group) or text-based information about quantitative evidence (control group). It was hypothesized that participants receiving interactive information on the prevention of COVID-19 infections show a significantly higher willingness to comply with future containment measures than participants reading the text-based information. Explorative analyses were conducted to examine whether other factors influence compliance.
Results
As predicted, we found a small effect (d = 0.22, 95% CI: 0.11; 0.23, p < .001) for the tested intervention. The exploratory analysis suggests a decline in compliance later in the study (r = −0.10, 95% CI: −0.15; −0.07). Another significant predictor of change in compliance was health-related anxiety, but the effect was trivial.
Conclusions
When presented interactively, information on how the own behavior can help prevent infectious diseases can lead to slightly stronger changes in attitude towards behavioral prevention measures than just text-based information. Given the scalability of this simple internet-based intervention, it could play a role in fostering compliance during a pandemic within universal prevention strategies. Future work on the predictive validity of self-reported compliance and the real-world effects on the intervention is needed.
Facial expressions play a crucial role in human interactions. Typically, a positive (negative) expression evokes a congruent positive (negative) reaction within the observer. This congruent behavior is inverted, however, when the same positive (negative) expression is displayed by an outgroup member. Two approaches provide an explanation for this phenomenon. The social intentions account proposes underlying social messages within the facial display, whereas the processing conflict account assumes an affective conflict triggered by incongruent combinations of emotion and the affective connotation of group membership. In three experiments, we aimed at further substantiating the processing conflict account by separating the affective conflict from potential social intentions. For this, we created a new paradigm, in which the participant was an outside observer of a social interaction scene between two faces. Participants were required to respond to the emotional target person that could represent an ingroup or outgroup member. In all three experiments, irrespective of any social intention, responses were consistently affected by the group relation between participant and emotional target, i.e., the affective (in)congruency of the target seen by participants. These results further support the processing conflict account. The implications for the two theoretical accounts are discussed.