Understanding the Relationship Between Official and Social Information About Infectious Disease: Experimental Analysis.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Communicating official public health information about infectious diseases is complicated by the fact that individuals receive much of their information from their social contacts, either via interpersonal interaction or social media, which can be prone to bias and misconception.

Objective

This study aims to evaluate the effect of public health campaigns and the effect of socially communicated health information on learning about diseases simultaneously. Although extant literature addresses the effect of one source of information (official or social) or the other, it has not addressed the simultaneous interaction of official information (OI) and social information (SI) in an experimental setting.

Methods

We used a series of experiments that exposed particip

SUBMITTER: Assaf E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8663576 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature