The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed serious faults in how science and scientific recommendations are communicated to the public. Typical approaches to health communication by experts and the media have not been sufficient to counter the profound loss of trust in reliable health information and expert recommendations during the pandemic and may have even contributed to public dissatisfaction. Our goal is to use large-scale experimental studies to generate evidence on how to stop this trend through scientific communication that engders long-term trust in science, medicine, and expert recommendations. We aim to directly translate these findings into actionable policy by creating an evidence base for how experts and news organizations should communicate health information to the public.
Research in this area:
Nikkil Sudharsanan, Caterina Favaretti, Violetta Hachaturyan, Till Bärnighausen, Alain Vandormael
Preprint currently under review
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Main question: Does the way that COVID-19 vaccine side effects are framed and presented to individuals affect their perceptions of how safe the vaccine is and their willingness to be vaccinated?