In collaboration with an international team of researchers, Lisa Legault, Associate Professor of Psychology at Clarkson, recently published a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on how to effectively motivate people to engage in social distancing.
The international experiment was conducted using 25,718 participants from 89 countries, and translated into dozens of languages. As part of the lead design team, Legault and her co-authors won a science accelerator competition for COVID research in 2020, which enabled them to translate and disseminate their experimental protocol to more than 500 research labs worldwide.
The experiment tested the motivational qualities of messages about social distancing – comparing messages that were supportive of personal choice and agency (i.e., “autonomy-supportive”) to those that were forceful and shaming (i.e., “controlling”). The autonomy-supportive message decreased defiance of social distancing recommendations relative to the controlling message, and the controlling message increased controlled motivation, a less effective form of motivation, relative to no message. Although message type did not directly influence intentions to socially distance, participants’ level of autonomous motivation was related to increased intentions to engage in social distancing, whereas controlled motivation was related to fewer intentions. The findings are generalized across countries and can inform public health communication strategies in this and future global health emergencies.
You can read the paper here: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2111091119
Legault is a social psychologist who studies effective and ineffective motivational communication.
