Resilience Messaging: The Effect of Governors’ Social Media Communications on Community Compliance During a Public Health Crisis

When managing major disasters, authorities may ask residents to comply with certain guidelines that change community members’ daily routines. In these situations, authorities often appeal to resilience, which refers to the ability to recover from challenges. In this study, we examine whether embedding resilience-related words (resilience messaging) in governors’ social media posts increases community compliance with government guidelines in the context of the COVID-19 disaster. First, we conducted a secondary data analysis using a panel data set of U.S. states. This analysis included community mobility data, governors’ tweets, official county tweets, approval ratings, new COVID-19 cases, and states’ response data for the period between February 2020 and August 2021 (81 weeks). We measure community compliance using the time residents spent at home and the time they spent at retail places, according to community mobility data. We also conducted an online controlled experiment to complement our secondary data analysis in order to identify the underlying mechanism. We show that governors’ resilience messaging increases community compliance (12.5% increase in time spent at home and 11% increase in avoiding unnecessary trips). We also find that the effect of resilience messaging on community compliance is mediated by residents’ perceptions of inspirational leadership.

History: This paper has been accepted for the Information Systems Research Special Section on Unleashing the Power of Information Technology for Strategic Management of Disasters. Ahmed Abbasi, Robin Dillon-Merrill, H. Raghav Rao, and Olivia Sheng, Senior Editors; Xiao Fang, Associate Editor.

Funding: This study was funded by Boston University's Questrom School of Business.

Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2021.0599.