全球智库信息集成服务系统

• The most effective campaigns are face-to-face, repeated campaigns. Such campaigns generally have a larger average impact on persuasion, knowledge, and behavior than ones conducted through television or the internet.
• Negative and positive messages appear to be almost equally effective in motivating behavioral change. Negative messaging does seem to be more memorable than other types of messages, but they can also lead to backlash against the sender.
• Targeting a message to a particular subpopulation greatly increases the success rate of information campaigns, especially if the targeting stresses peer groups or community norms.
• In complex environments where people are bombarded by a wide range of messages, adversarial messaging efforts tend to cancel each other out.

Russian efforts to influence the populations of the United States and its allies and partners — including such aggressive means as disinformation campaigns and social media "troll farms" — are a central element of the strategic competition taking place between the United States and Russia. Both countries use public communication campaigns, sometimes referred to as "information warfare," to try to gain advantage over the other. But how effective are these efforts?

The authors of this report systematically reviewed rigorous evaluations of the effectiveness of communications campaigns to develop insights into what types of public communications campaigns and messages are most effective and in what contexts. The authors detail their findings and provide recommendations for how the United States can maximize the effectiveness of its public communications in competition with Russia.

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