Vaccine Messaging & Social Networks: Pilot Results and Study Design

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Presenter

James Allen *, with Tanya Rosenblat and Dean Yang

* Doctoral Candidate in Public Policy & Economics at the University of Michigan

Abstract

We ran a pilot phone survey experiment to evaluate the potential of motivating COVID-19 vaccine take-up via messages selected by members of one’s social network. Vaccine messaging selected by one’s social network may be more effective than general public health messaging for several reasons: (1) message recipients pay more attention to messages sent by their social network - in particular if senders are socially close to them; (2) recipients can enforce compliance, especially for socially close senders; (3) senders can customize the message to the recipient type - for example, a sender can send new factual information to the receiver if she thinks the receiver is uninformed or she can send a message appealing to the receiver’s altruism if she thinks the receiver is civic-minded. In our pilot we randomly paired senders with receivers who were known or unknown to them and asked them to select messages from 4 different message types (altruism, free-riding, social-norms, social learning) and where the receiver would either learn or not learn the sender’s identity. Analyzing messages selected by 2,075 respondents, we find that message selection varies by whether the receiver was known or unknown to the sender. We do not find evidence for enforcement as senders send the same messages regardless of whether the receiver can observe their identity. We also find some evidence that senders possess hidden knowledge about the recipients’ type – mainly, senders are more likely to select an altruism message for known contacts who are “altruistic type” by our measure. We seek feedback on the pilot results and on our proposed study to evaluate whether social-network-selected messages are more effective at motivating uptake of the COVID-19 vaccine.