Too close for comfort: leveraging identity-based relevance through targeted health information backfires for Black Americans.

This article investigates the effects of information targeting—a communication strategy that customizes health messages based on group-level characteristics such as marginalized racial identities—on Black and White Americans' engagement with health information. Across two online experimental studies, findings reveal that Black Americans who perceive health messages as targeted based on their racial identity experience increased social identity threat, leading to decreased attention to the message and reduced trust in the message provider, whereas White Americans show no such negative responses. Social identity threat mediates these effects and predicts downstream cognitive and behavioral outcomes, including lower information recognition and reduced willingness to engage in recommended health behaviors. The research highlights that race-based targeting can constitute overaccommodation, inadvertently undermining the intended persuasive impact among Black audiences due to concerns about stigmatization and negative group evaluation. These findings underscore the importance of carefully considering how marginalized identities are incorporated into health communication to avoid exacerbating disparities.