In COVID-19 Health Messaging, Loss Framing Increases Anxiety with Little-to-No Concomitant Benefits: Experimental Evidence from 84 Countries.

The COVID-19 pandemic (and its aftermath) highlights a critical need to communicate health information effectively to the global public. Given that subtle differences in information framing can have meaningful effects on behavior, behavioral science research highlights a pressing question: Is it more effective to frame COVID-19 health messages in terms of potential losses (e.g., "If you do not practice these steps, you can endanger yourself and others") or potential gains (e.g., "If you practice these steps, you can protect yourself and others")? Collecting data in 48 languages from 15,929 participants in 84 countries, we experimentally tested the effects of message framing on COVID-19-related judgments, intentions, and feelings. Loss- (vs. gain-) framed messages increased self-reported anxiety among participants cross-nationally with little-to-no impact on policy attitudes, behavioral intentions, or information seeking relevant to pandemic risks. These results were consistent across 84 countries, three variations of the message framing wording, and 560 data processing and analytic choices. Thus, results provide an empirical answer to a global communication question and highlight the emotional toll of loss-framed messages. Critically, this work demonstrates the importance of considering unintended affective consequences when evaluating nudge-style interventions.

Factors in workers' dehumanization: Multiple stigmatization, social status, and workers' sex.

The aim of this study is to examine how different factors (multiple stigmatization, perceived social status, and workers' sex) as well as their interactions are associated with the dehumanization of workers. In the preliminary study (N = 991), we selected 16 occupations with different types of stigmatization and perceived status relevant to the Russian socio-cultural context. In two experimental studies (N1 = 1060, N2 = 1081), we demonstrated that multiple stigmatization increases metaphor-based and attribute-based animalistic but not mechanistic dehumanization: low-status workers were more animalistically dehumanized than high-status workers; the high status decreased the metaphor-based animalistic dehumanization of occupations with multiple stigmatization, and the attribute-based animalistic and mechanistic dehumanization of workers regardless of their stigmatization; and male workers were more mechanistically dehumanized than female ones but there were no differences in animalistic dehumanization. The results obtained are discussed in the context of understanding the specificity of workers' dehumanization and the possible consequences of this dehumanization.