Negative consequences of failing to communicate uncertainties during a pandemic: an online randomised controlled trial on COVID-19 vaccines
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Abstract
To examine the impact of the government communicating uncertainties relating to COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness on vaccination intention and trust after people are exposed to conflicting information.
Design
Experimental design where participants were randomly allocated to one of two groups.
Setting
Online.
Participants
328 adults from a UK research panel.
Intervention
Participants received either certain or uncertain communications from a government representative about COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness, before receiving conflicting information about effectiveness.
Main outcome measures
Vaccination intention and trust in government.
Results
Compared with those who received the uncertain announcement from the government, participants who received the certain announcement reported a greater loss of vaccination intention (d = 0.34, 95% CI (0.12 to 0.56), p=0.002) and trust (d = 0.34, 95% CI (0.12 to 0.56), p=0.002) after receiving conflicting information.
Conclusions
Communicating with certainty about COVID-19 vaccines reduces vaccination intention and trust if conflicting information arises, whereas communicating uncertainties can protect people from the negative impact of exposure to conflicting information. There are likely to be other factors affecting vaccine intentions, which we do not account for in this study.
Trial registration number
Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/c73px/ .
Article activity feed
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.02.28.21252616: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Limitations: Our findings highlight the benefits of communicating uncertainties in health, but they are only a starting point. Given their limitations, we recommend caution in interpreting and implementing these findings. We largely focused on uncertainties relating to vaccine effectiveness. Figures of vaccine effectiveness are often …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.02.28.21252616: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Limitations: Our findings highlight the benefits of communicating uncertainties in health, but they are only a starting point. Given their limitations, we recommend caution in interpreting and implementing these findings. We largely focused on uncertainties relating to vaccine effectiveness. Figures of vaccine effectiveness are often communicated with precision (e.g. 70% effectiveness) even though they come with confidence intervals, which we communicated in this study. Beyond this, there are many uncertainties relating to vaccines during a novel pandemic worth exploring. Risks of side effects, including unforeseen risks which are not detectable in trials over short time periods, are particularly important to the public when making vaccination decisions [33]. Many are motivated to get vaccinated to reduce the spread of the virus and lift restrictions in place to control it, although whether the vaccination programme can do so is not necessarily known until well underway [34]. It is unclear which of these uncertainties will have a stronger impact on vaccination intention, although we expect exposure to conflicting information relating to all of these to have similar effects to those we report here. We also do not know what the combined effects are of all these uncertainties and multiple exposures to conflicting information. We only exposed participants to one instance of conflicting information, whereas there are likely to be many more throughout a pandemic. Vaccination intent...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
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