“Let’s get back to normal” was a phrase that circulated the globe at the height of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. To some, getting vaccinated to accelerate a return to normalcy was a no-brainer, but others felt various degrees of hesitation. Still, experts estimate that the COVID-19 vaccine prevented nearly 19.8 million deaths globally within the first year of vaccination. Why, then, does vaccine hesitancy persist?

In a recent publication in the journal Frontiers in Public Health, Krista Muis, a professor in McGill’s Faculty of Education, investigated the effectiveness of three different messages for persuading individuals to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Muis’ involvement was driven by the urgency of the pandemic and the intensity of conversations surrounding it.

“When COVID hit, there were a lot of misconceptions about it,” Muis said in an interview with The Tribune. “It seemed like a natural fit to look at something so relevant, so pressing, so immediate […] and impacting society at that moment.”

Muis was interested in examining how principles of persuasion from past research would apply to the pandemic and how emotions played a role in the decision-making process of getting vaccinated.

“I really wanted to make an impact and to get people to think about getting vaccinated,” Muis emphasized.

She collected data from 436 participants who self-reported their concern for COVID-19 and their confidence or hesitancy towards vaccination. She then randomly assigned participants to one of three text conditions.

The first was self-interest: This condition consisted of a persuasive message highlighting how serious of a threat COVID-19 was to the participant and the need to get vaccinated to ‘protect yourself.’

The second condition involved both self-interest and altruism—the practice of concern for the well-being of others. This condition featured a persuasive message focusing on COVID-19 being a threat to the participant and their community, emphasizing ‘protect[ing] you and your loved ones.’ 

“There are seniors that are getting sick and dying,” Muis explained. “If we get vaccinated, that will protect them. It’s doing something for the [betterment] of the community.”

The third condition combined self-interest, altruism, and an appeal to normalcy: A persuasive message including the other conditions but adding ‘this is the only way to get back to normal life.’

“That was one thing I heard a lot of people talking about—how it was awful, how we couldn’t socialize anymore, how we couldn’t go for dinner, nothing was normal,” Muis said.

There was also a baseline condition: A control with no textual information delivered.

The results indicated that the third condition was most effective at increasing participants’ willingness to get vaccinated. For those labelled vaccine-hesitant, these results bring important implications for similar contexts in the future.

“If ever we were to be in another situation like this, then we have a better understanding of what kind of messaging we need moving forward,” Muis said.

In the study, Muis also investigated emotions—quantified using self-report questionnaires—as a core variable in participants’ feelings toward COVID-19 and getting vaccinated.

Emotions such as joy, hope, and relief were shown to increase across all conditions with persuasive messages. Muis noted that experts believe that those in a positive mood tend to process information more holistically, making this an ideal environment to foster, especially for those with vaccine hesitancy. 

“We wanted to minimize the anger that they would experience reading about vaccinations. Having the messages focus on the positive […] would hopefully decrease the negative emotions they might have otherwise experienced,” Muis explained.

Moreover, giving participants the autonomy to select which brand of vaccine they wanted also increased willingness to get vaccinated.
Muis’ study highlights the power of persuasion and its ability to impact global health. Moving forward, investigating other contexts with differing value systems—for example, countries with a less collectivist emphasis—may be useful in establishing persuasive techniques that are unique and adjusted to each context’s values. With the pervasiveness of COVID-19, addressing the controversy surrounding vaccination is critical to our safety, health, and advancement of society.