Promoting the Ambiguity of a Public Health Crisis Can Facilitate Adjustment: The Joint Influence of an Ambiguous Message Focus and Implicit Self-Theories

ABSTRACT

In the early stage of a novel public health crisis, such as an infectious disease, there is often uncertainty about whether the crisis will be permanent. We find that emphasizing the potential permanency of the situation surrounding the crisis can backfire, depending on the implicit self-theory held by people. Data collected during the COVID-19 outbreak showed that when the crisis situation was communicated as potentially being permanent in nature, entity theorists, who view personal qualities as fixed, were more reluctant to adjust to it than incremental theorists, who view personal qualities as malleable. The results were consistent whether implicit self-theory was measured as an individual difference factor (study 1) or manipulated (study 2). We reason that entity and incremental theorists make different inferences about what is required to adjust under the potentially permanent crisis situation: Entity theorists tend to infer that it involves substantial change in the self, whereas incremental theorists tend to infer that it involves crisis-specific behavioral changes. Importantly, we find that communicating ambiguity by leaving open the possibility of two opposing outcomes – the crisis situation may be permanent or temporary – effectively increases entity theorists’ intentions to adjust by encouraging them to infer that adjusting to the crisis involves crisis-specific behavioral changes (study 2).

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no conflicts of interest in preparing this article.

Notes

1. All data have been made publicly available via Open Science Framework and can be accessed at https://osf.io/7ra9v/?view_only=3bbe9f8467864b9a96c9ad72ba92df20. The study protocols were approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB).

2. When the 25 responses were included in the analysis, the pattern remained largely the same. Although the interaction between implicit self-theory manipulation and message focus on intention to adjust to the crisis did not reach the conventional level of significance (F(1, 279) = 2.99, p = .085), the interaction on crisis-specific inferences remained significant (F(1, 279) = 6.13, p = .014); and moderated mediation (the indirect effects of message focus on intention to adjust through crisis-specific inferences) was supported (indirect effect = −.32, SE = .14, 95% CI = [−.62, −.07]).

3. We expected that our message focus manipulation would heighten more individual-level changes (rather than social-level changes). In order to check this, we ran a pilot study. Participants recruited from Amazon’s MTurk were asked to read either the permanent or ambiguous message focus manipulation used in either study 1 or 2 (between subjects); they were then asked to describe any changes they observed since the virus outbreak that came to their mind right away. Although participants predominantly mentioned individual-level changes, about 15% of participants misread the message and mentioned only social-level changes. We believe it is important to address this potential limitation in future research.