@misc{petersen_christiansen_bor_lindholt_jørgensen_adler-nissen_roepstorff_lehmann_2021, 
  title={Communicate Hope to Motivate Action Against Highly Infectious SARS-CoV-2 Variants}, 
  DOI={10.31234/osf.io/gxcyn}, 
  abstractNote={<p>The world is facing a race between controlling new and more infectious variants of coronavirus and implementing vaccinations: How can health authorities and governments most effectively communicate the need to engage more strongly in protective behavior to avoid a collapse of the healthcare system until vaccination programs are effective? In the first wave of the pandemic, citizens became engaged in `flattening the curve' via powerful visualizations. Here, we use epidemiological modelling to develop a new visual communication aid, `buying time with hope', which reflects the pandemic trade-offs currently facing governments, authorities and citizens. Using a population-based experiment conducted in United States (N = 3,022), we demonstrate that this hope-oriented visual communication aid, depicting the competing effects on the epidemic curve of (1) more infectious variants and (2) vaccinations, motivates public action and communicates more effectively than fear-oriented visual communication, focusing exclusively on the threat of the new variants. Finally, using cross-national representative surveys from eight countries (N = 3,995), we document the urgent need to motivate public action to halt the spread of the new, more infectious variants. These findings not only provide public health authorities globally with a validated blueprint for health communication in a critical period of the pandemic but also provide general psychological insights into the importance of hope as a health communication strategy.</p>}, 
  publisher={Center for Open Science}, 
  author={Petersen, Michael Bang and Christiansen, Lasse Engbo and Bor, Alexander and Lindholt, Marie Fly and Jørgensen, Frederik Juhl and Adler-Nissen, Rebecca and Roepstorff, Andreas and Lehmann, Sune}, 
  year={2021}, 
  month={Feb}
  }