Challenging Moral Attitudes With Moral Messages

Abstract

When crafting a message, communicators may turn to moral rhetoric as a means of influencing an audience’s opinion. In the present research, we tested whether the persuasiveness of explicitly moral counterattitudinal messages depends on how much people have already based their attitudes on moral considerations. A survey of the literature suggests several competing hypotheses that we tested across two studies. The results support a persuasive-matching pattern: A moral appeal was more persuasive than a nonmoral appeal to the extent that initial attitudes were based on moral concerns (i.e., attitudes were moralized), but the opposite was true when initial attitudes had less of a moral basis. Exploratory analyses also showed that these effects were mediated by valenced thoughts about the message and moderated by political orientation. These findings add new insight to literatures on both the effects of moral arguments and moralized attitudes.

Evaluations of Self-Focused Versus Other-Focused Arguments for Social Distancing: An Extension of Moral Matching Effects

“…By testing how much public health moralization moderates the relative efficacy of self-versus other-focused appeals, the present work extends moral persuasion research in two ways. First, whereas Luttrell et al (2019) focused on counterattitudinal persuasion in which the arguments directly challenged preexisting attitudes, the present work examines receptivity to arguments about a novel health practice for which the recommendations are largely either neutral or proattitudinal. Second, we extend moral persuasion research to the specific distinction between self-focused versus other-focused appeals.…”

Attitude strength: Distinguishing predictors versus defining features

“…Mucciaroni, 2011), which would match the basis of moralized attitudes. Luttrell, Philipp-Muller, and Petty (2019) manipulated whether messages made moral versus non-moral arguments. For non-moral messages, more moralized attitudes were more resistant to persuasion, consistent with moralization as a predictor of attitude strength.…”

Leveraging Social Science to Generate Lasting Engagement with Climate Change Solutions

“…42 In sum, emphasizing moral dimensions of climate change can result in more people seeing the issue from a moral perspective, which can restructure the fundamental motives for environmental attitudes and action. Furthermore, such moral messages are unlikely to lead to backlash effects, 18,91,95 and have been shown to be especially effective in contexts when people are motivated to affirm their moral values. 96 Future research could test which moral appeals resonate best with different audience segments, whether moral appeals can reduce counterarguing, and how the effectiveness of moral appeals interacts with characteristics of the messenger or source.…”