Trading-off health safety, civil liberties, and unemployment based on communication strategies: the social dilemma in fighting pandemics

Crisis management often requires decisions that prioritize the collective good over individual interests. Effective crisis communication strategies can influence individuals’ behavior towards the collective good, preventing negative societal externalities. However, little is known about how these strategies affect individual acceptance of decisions that involve trade-offs between individual and collective interests. We study individual choice behavior regarding maintaining or lifting government-imposed restrictions on private and public life in a referendum setting in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Maintaining or lifting the restrictive measures represents a social dilemma that involves trade-offs between civil liberties, health safety, and economic consequences. In three online experiments, we test the impact of communication strategies that focus on health and/or economic factors, as well as risk attribution (i.e. who is at risk by an increase of infections), on individual acceptance of restrictive measures. Results across all experiments show that the majority favors maintaining the COVID-19 measures, indicating that individuals act ethically by trading off individual harm (i.e., restrictions on private and public life) for the prevention of increased societal harm (i.e., infections, deaths). When communication focuses only on health factors, acceptance levels remain robust, regardless of whether the risk is attributed to others, the individual’s group, or the individual. However, when economic factors (i.e., unemployment rates) are included, acceptance of restrictive measures significantly drops. Notably, in an economic-focused communication, attributing risk to the individual’s group increases acceptance such that significantly less individuals vote to lift measures when their group is at higher risk. Overall, these results demonstrate the impact of communication strategies on acceptance of crisis management measures: Our findings have implications for policy makers who design communication strategies to enforce restrictive policies in times of crisis.