JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Communicating official public health information about infectious disease is complicated by the reality 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:

While 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 and social information in an experimental setting. This paper evaluates the effect of public health campaigns and the effect of socially communicated health information on learning about disease simultaneously.

Methods:

We utilized a series of experiments that exposed participants to both official information and structured social information about the symptoms and spread of Hepatitis C over a series of ten rounds of computer­-based interactions. Participants were randomly assigned to receive a high, low, or control intensity of official information (OI) and to receive accurate or inaccurate social information (SI) about the disease.

Results:

In total, there were 195 participants. 186 of these respondents had complete responses across all ten experimental rounds, which corresponds to a 4.6% non­response rate. The official information high intensity treatment increases learning over the control condition for all symptom and contagion questions where individuals have lower levels of baseline knowledge (p­-values ≤ 0.04). The accurate social information condition increased learning across experimental rounds over the inaccurate condition (p­-values all ≤ 0.01). We find limited evidence of an interaction between official and social information about infectious disease.

Conclusions:

This project demonstrates that exposure to official public health information does increase individuals’ knowledge about the spread and symptoms of disease. Socially shared information also facilitates learning of accurate and inaccurate information, though to a lesser magnitude than exposure to official information. While the effect of official information does persist, preliminary results suggest it can be degraded by persistent contradictory social information over time.