The Roles of Leadership and Social Norms in Health Communication in the Context of COVID-19

The whole world has been struggling with the COVID-19 pandemic for almost three
years. Although national and local leaders have often called on the public to comply
with preventive measures through health communication, crowds sometimes violate
precautions and do not adequately follow these calls. We propose that identity
entrepreneurship characteristic of leaders and social norms might play an essential
role in effective health communication. In line with this notion, we investigated the
effects of the leadership and social norm types on complying with preventive
measures, the intention to be vaccinated, and prosocial behavior through a highpowered experiment that focused on the leadership quality (presence/lack of
entrepreneurship), descriptive norm (supportive/obstructive), and injunctive norm
(supportive/obstructive). We found that when supporting injunctive and descriptive
norms are present, people tend to adhere more to preventive measures, get
vaccinated, and engage in pro-social behavior. There was also a significant effect of
the interaction between descriptive and injunctive norms on compliance with preventive
measures. The compliance level was highest when both norm types were supportive,
but the compliance level was lowest when both were obstructive. The effect was
decreased in the discrepant norms condition, where one type of the norm was
supportive and the other obstructive. There is also a significant interaction between
leadership and descriptive norm, indicating when there is an entrepreneur leader and
supportive descriptive norm, compliance with the preventive measure increases. We
discussed the role of leadership and social norms in effective health communication.