Emma R. Knapp, Brianna A. Smith, and Matthew P. Motta
How to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic has become one of the most polarizing policy questions in the United States. While liberals have focused on COVID-19 as a key public health threat, to be combatted aggressively with lockdowns, school closures, masking, and vaccination, many conservatives have been less likely to see COVID-19 as a major threat to their well-being and more likely to be concerned about economic impacts.
Ultimately, the COVID-19 pandemic has had both negative health and economic impacts for millions of Americans. In theory, these impacts could have been reduced (and continue to be reduced) if more Americans were to get vaccinated, engage in physical distancing, and mask when appropriate. How can public health officials reach out to the skeptical and convince them to do so?
In our recently published article in the Journal of Experimental Political Science, we test whether “complementary frames” can change COVID-19 attitudes. ‘Frames’ refers to the way a message is worded, and what parts of an issue are emphasized. `Complementary frames’ combine multiple different frames into a single strategic message.
Message framing research shows that people gravitate towards frames they already agree with. Liberals are more likely to agree with frames that emphasize the public health risks of COVID-19, while conservatives are more likely to agree frames that emphasize the economic costs of interruptions to daily life. But promising research suggests that combining frames and emphasizing elements that they share using complementary framing can appeal to people across political divides. Thus far, however, this research has focused on issues where people typically have weakly-held preferences – not the case when it comes to COVID-19.
In two national surveys of American adults, we randomly presented people with messages that either emphasized the threat of COVID-19 using single frames (i.e., public health, economic risks) or complementary frames (i.e., that emphasize both), or a control condition that contained no message about COVID-19. In each COVID-19 message, we also included information that highlighted the importance of vaccination.
In our first survey, conducted in March 2021, we found promising indications that conservatives – who past research finds are less likely to take protective health action to reduce transmission of COVID-19 – were more willing to engage in COVID-19 prevention behavior and support policies that seek to mitigate the threat of COVID-19 in the complementary frame condition. However, in a second study conducted in September 2021 with three times as many participants, we fail to replicate this effect.
Ultimately, we conclude that while complementary frames are a promising way to bring people together, they may also be less effective when it comes to highly polarized issues. It may also be that as the COVID-19 pandemic has continued for almost two years, people have become more certain that they know how to handle it and more resistant to new messages. Future research should focus on both the limitations of complementary frames and developing new messages about COVID-19 (or future pandemics) which will be more successful than the ones we tested.