Communicating health disparities in mass and social media has typically taken the form of comparing disease risks and outcomes between two or more social groups, a strategy known as social comparison framing. This comprehensive review examined the design and results of 17 studies from 15 peer-reviewed journal articles about the effects of social comparison framing of health disparities. Most studies focus on race-based disparities across a variety of health topics. For individual-level outcomes, social comparison tends to reduce perceived disease risks for the lower disease prevalence group while prompting negative emotions and yielding inconsistent impact on health behavioral intentions among members of the higher prevalence group. For societal-level outcomes, social comparison often has either null or polarizing effects on support for policies to address these disparities that vary by racial identity/attitudes of the respondents. Studies also find that racial comparisons trigger lower levels of support for policy remedies relative to economic, educational, or geographic comparisons. We conclude that social comparison framing of health disparities, in the absence of broader discussion of the social and structural causes of these disparities, is more likely to incur negative consequences. We propose several possible strategies to communicate health disparity information more effectively.

中文翻译：

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使用社会比较框架传达健康差异的影响：综合回顾

在大众和社交媒体上传达健康差异通常采取比较两个或多个社会群体之间疾病风险和结果的形式，这种策略称为社会比较框架。这篇综合综述审查了 15 篇同行评审期刊文章中 17 项研究的设计和结果，这些研究涉及健康差异的社会比较框架的影响。大多数研究都集中在各种健康主题上基于种族的差异。对于个人层面的结果，社会比较往往会降低疾病患病率较低群体的感知疾病风险，同时会引发负面情绪，并对患病率较高群体的成员的健康行为意图产生不一致的影响。对于社会层面的结果来说，社会比较往往对解决这些差异的政策的支持产生无效或两极分化的影响，这些差异因受访者的种族身份/态度而异。研究还发现，与经济、教育或地理比较相比，种族比较引发的对政策补救措施的支持水平较低。我们的结论是，在缺乏对这些差异的社会和结构原因进行更广泛讨论的情况下，健康差异的社会比较框架更有可能产生负面后果。我们提出了几种可能的策略来更有效地传达健康差异信息。