Evaluating Prosocial COVID-19 Messaging Frames: Evidence from a Field Study on Facebook

The rapid spread of COVID-19 has emphasized the need for effective health communications to coordinate individual behavior and mitigate disease transmission. Facing a pandemic, individuals may be driven to adopt public health recommendations based on both self-interested desires to protect oneself and prosocial desires to protect others. Although messages can be framed around either, existing research from the social sciences has offered mixed evidence regarding their relative efficacy. Informing this dialogue, in the current study we report on the findings of a field experiment (N = 25,580) conducted on Facebook during the critical initial weeks of the COVID-19 outbreak. Our observations indicate that the efficacy of prosocial ad messaging depends upon the distance of the social group in focus. Specifically, while distant prosocial framing (“protect your community”) was significantly less effective than self-focused framing (“protect yourself”), close prosocial framing (“protect your loved ones”) was equally effective as self-focused framing in eliciting clickthroughs to official CDC recommendations.