We study how social proximity between the sender and the receiver of information shapes the effectiveness of preventive health behaviour campaigns and the persistence of misinformation. We implement a field experiment among a representative sample of slum residents in two major Indian cities characterized by Hindu-Muslim tensions. We show that informative messages are effective at improving evidence-based behavior, but not non-evidence-based behavior. These findings do not differ by social proximity, signalled by religion. However, when sender and receiver share the same religion, the intervention significantly reduces misinformation carrying in-group salience, highlighting the role of social proximity in fighting misinformation.
Authors
Britta Augsburg
Britta is an IFS Associate Director, Associate Staff at the Department of Economics at the UC and Researcher at NIHR Obesity Policy Research Unit.
Alex Armand
Alex is an IFS Research Fellow, an Associate Professor at Nova School of Business and Economics and a Research Affiliate at the CEPR.
Antonella Bancalari
Antonella Bancalari is a Senior Research Economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
Kalyan Kumar Kameshwara
More from IFS
Understand this issue
Policy analysis
Academic research
