Seatbelts and raincoats, or banks and castles: Investigating the impact of vaccine metaphors.

ABSTRACT: While metaphors are frequently used to address misconceptions and hesitancy about vaccines, it is unclear how effective they are in health messaging. Using a between-subject, pretest/posttest design, we investigated the impact of explanatory metaphors on people's attitudes toward vaccines. We recruited participants online in the US (N = 301) and asked them to provide feedback on a (fictional) health messaging campaign, which we organized around responses to five common questions about vaccines. All participants completed a 24-item measure of their attitudes towards vaccines before and after evaluating the responses to the five questions. We created three possible response passages for each vaccine question: two included extended explanatory metaphors, and one contained a literal response (

SUBMITTER: Flusberg SJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10763949 | biostudies-literature | 2024

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature