N D DAILY NEWS
CORONAVIRUS
Getting the message across Ball State professor finds persuasive arguments for social distancing. Grace McCormick Assistant News Editor
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Letter to campus
Andrew Luttrell, Ball State assistant professor of psychological science, argued for social distancing by framing it in two ways: “think about your own health” and “think about everyone’s health.” Then, he asked people which argument was more persuasive. Emphasizing a moral responsibility to slow the spread of COVID-19 could persuade more people to socially distance and follow public health guidelines, according to a recent study by Luttrell and Richard E. Petty, Ohio State University professor of psychology. The study took less than five months to publish after research began in March 2020, which Luttrell said is probably his fastest project. He began his study with Petty through online surveys and said the peer review process was quicker than normal research papers due to the timeliness of coronavirus research. “Probably, this project moved faster than any other research project I’ve been involved with,” Luttrell said. “The criticism is it’s going too fast … How do you make sure that you’re doing the best quality research as possible, even though you’re trying to move quickly?” Despite that criticism, Luttrell thinks they may have started research a few weeks too late because people were already being asked to practice social distancing by the time the study started. “These messages had been flying across social media and on the news,” Luttrell said. “Lots of cities were having lockdowns … so you kind of were forced to practice distancing.” Over the course of the study, Luttrell and Petty collected data from 863 voluntary participants through crowdsourcing platforms Amazon Mechanical Turk and Prolific. Survey questions asked participants if they thought of public health as a moral issue and to rate the persuasiveness and morality of different arguments for socially distancing.
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09.03.2020
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Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention MAGGIE GETZIN, DN ILLUSTRATION
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