How College Students React to COVID Vaccine PSAs: An Experimental Investigation

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.

Automated summary

This study explores how political and psychological factors influence the effectiveness of PSAs promoting COVID-19 vaccines. It finds that different types of PSAs have varying effects on students' emotional reactions and assessments, and these effects are further influenced by individuals' political and psychological predispositions. Informational PSAs are effective in promoting learning, while humorous and emotional PSAs are only effective for those who are already receptive to the vaccine.