Social-psychological factors influencing risk perceptions of chronic wasting disease on social media

ABSTRACT

Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is a prion-based disease that poses an imminent threat to New York State (NYS), but many NYS hunters do not perceive it as a salient issue or follow recommended practices to prevent its spread to NYS. This study sought to identify the social-psychological factors underlying the efficacy of social media interventions to increase risk perceptions of CWD in NYS. We conducted an online survey experiment with 2760 NYS hunters and found that perceived similarity of an information source on social media and hunters’ biospheric values and descriptive norms increased risk perceptions of the threat of CWD to deer and deer hunting in NYS. We also found that biospheric values and knowledge increased risk perceptions of behaviors contributing to the spread of CWD to NYS. We encourage regulators to collaborate with opinion leaders in the hunting community to disseminate CWD prevention messages on social media to maximize message efficacy.

KEYWORDS:

• Biospheric values
• descriptive norms
• knowledge
• risk perceptions
• source credibility

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by New York Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Grant WE-173-G, and USDA APHIS (Project 14812: Developing a researched based Digital Media Campaign to reduce the risks of CWD; Jeremy Hurst Principal Investigator). We are grateful to the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation, particularly Courtney LaMere, Kevin Hynes, Scott Stevens, Benjamin Bober, and David Nelson, for their contributions to this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. 4,433 out of 6,013 respondents from the first survey agreed to be contacted for this follow-up survey. 95.5% of those who agreed to be resurveyed had gone afield to hunt deer in NYS at least once in the last 5 years compared to 90.1% of those who did not agree. 80.1% had killed a deer in the last 5 years compared to 71.5% of those who did not agree to be surveyed. Those who agreed to be resurveyed were more likely to say they knew a moderate amount or a lot about CWD (36.9% vs. 23.2%), were moderately or very concerned about CWD (54.4% vs. 43.8%), and think that it should be a high priority for the state wildlife agency to keep CWD out of NYS (86.8% vs. 77.%).

2. Although only 25% of respondents reported having hunted out-of-state over the last five years, statistics from a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services report showed that on the average, only 15% of hunters hunted out-of-state (U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. Census Bureau, 2016). As such, although only a minority of our respondents hunted out-of-state, they overrepresent the proportion of hunters who hunt out-of-state across the U.S.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the USDA APHIS; New York Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Grant [WE-173-G].