Think about your friends and family: The disparate impacts of relationship-centered messages on privacy concerns, protective health behavior, and vaccination against Covid-19

OBJECTIVE: To understand which factors affect how willing people are to share their personal information to combat the Covid-19 pandemic, and compare them to factors that affect other public health behaviors. METHOD: We analyze data from three pre-registered online experiments conducted over eight months during the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States (April 3 2020 –November 25, 2020). Our primary analysis tests whether support for data sharing and intention to practice protective behavior increase in response to relationship-centered messages about prosociality, disease spread, and financial hardship. We then conduct a secondary correlational analysis to compare the demographic and attitudinal factors associated with willingness to share data, protective behavior, and intent to get vaccinated. Our sample (N = 650) is representative to socio-demographic characteristics of the U.S. population. RESULTS: We find the altruistic condition increased respondents’ willingness to share data. In our correlational analysis, we find interactive effects of political ID and socio-demographic traits on likelihood to share data. In contrast, we found health behavior was most strongly associated with political ID, and intent to vaccinate was more associated with socio-demographic traits. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that some public health messaging, even when it is not about data sharing or privacy, may increase public willingness to share data. We also find the role of socio-demographic factors in moderating the effect of political party ID varies by public health behavior.