Understanding how people respond to changes in science and scientific recommendations
Channel: Research Shorts
Date: 2022-03-07

Understanding how the public responds to changes in science can help science communicators create relevant, timely, clearer, and stronger messages that could improve the uptake of the latest and best available public health recommendations.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, public health guidelines have changed as scientists have had time and opportunities to study the virus. How people respond to these changes tells us something about their likelihood to adhere to public health guidelines. Our research team wanted to know: How do people react to changes in scientific information? 

We compared and contrasted two public discussions taking place on Twitter between April and June of 2020. One that focused on face masks, and one that focused on COVID-19 vaccines. We chose this timeframe because at the time, public health recommendations about masks were changing, but recommendations about vaccines were not. By comparing tweets on both masks and vaccines, we could better understand how the public was responding to public health guidelines.  

We examined nearly 700,000 tweets that mentioned the words “mask” or “vaccine” in a dataset specific to COVID-19.  We found that mask-related tweets over this time period were more emotionally-charged than tweets about vaccines. We also found that mask-related tweets were less focused on scientific research than vaccine-related tweets

Our findings suggest that science and health communicators can anticipate strong emotional responses to changes in public health recommendations. Such information may circulate rapidly online. 

Public communication about changing science should be developed with this in mind. For instance, if public health communicators need to recommend changes to public health guidelines, they should dedicate equal time to crafting clear and succinct explanations for changes to be circulated alongside the new instructions. The reasoning for changes should be clear and explicit.

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