Heuristic responses to pandemic uncertainty: Practicable communication strategies of "reasoned transparency" to aid public reception of changing science.

Scientific uncertainty during pandemic outbreaks poses a challenge for health communicators. Debates continue over the extent to which health officials should be transparent about uncertainty and the extent to which they should suppress uncertainty and risk losing the public's trust when information changes. The middle ground, the concept of "reasoned transparency," proposes that communicators focus on interpreting uncertainty to the public in ways informed by risk research.

"My People Already Know That": The Imagined Audience and COVID-19 Health Information Sharing Practices on Social Media.

This article examines how imagined audiences and impression management strategies shape COVID-19 health information sharing practices on social media and considers the implications of this for combatting the spread of misinformation online. In an interview study with 27 Canadian adults, participants were shown two infographics about masks and vaccines produced by the World Health Organization (WHO) and asked whether or not they would share these on social media. We find that interviewees' willingness to share the WHO infographics is negotiated against their mental perception of the online audience, which is conceptualized in three distinct ways.

An Evaluation of a Microlearning Intervention to Limit COVID-19 Online Misinformation.

As part of a design-based research project, we designed, developed, and evaluated a web-based microlearning intervention in the form of a comic into the problem of COVID-19 online misinformation. In this paper, we report on our formative evaluation efforts. Specifically, we assessed the degree to which the comic was effective and engaging via responses to a questionnaire ( = 295) in a posttest-only non-experimental design.

Design Principles for an Educational Intervention Into Online Vaccine Misinformation.

As part of a design-based research effort into disrupting the spread of COVID-19 misinformation, we have iteratively designed, developed, and evaluated a learning intervention intended for public audiences. In this paper we describe the design principles we created to guide our applied research into education on the topic of online misinformation. The six principles guiding our design are: microlearning; equity; relevance and appeal to learners; interventions that do not inadvertently spread misinformation; effective counter messaging; and engagement on an emotional level.