The Impact of Message Source on the Effectiveness of Communications About Climate Change

Abstract

We conducted a survey experiment in which we presented 1,850 respondents with one of two versions of an appeal emphasizing either the threats to the environment or threats to national security of the United States as a result of climate change. The messages were attributed to one of four sources: Republican Party leaders, Democratic Party leaders, military officials, or climate scientists. The results reveal that messages attributed to military leaders, or to Republican Party leaders, can enhance the impact of the appeal. This finding underscores the importance that the source of any communication can have on its overall effectiveness.

Testing the Effectiveness of Correction Placement and Type on Instagram

“…Alternatively, it may be the expertise signal of the user offering the correction (described as Prof. Mason Green although no other credibility cues are provided) facilitates correction, as expert organizations only need a single correction to reduce misperceptions on social media (Vraga and Bode 2017). Simply having “Prof” in the title may confer expertise, although future research should investigate the boundaries of expertise, given work on the importance of source cues (Bolsen et al 2019b). Of course, fact-focused correction offered in this study may have been strengthened if it included a link to an expert source—potentially negating the failure of the fact-focused prebunking to reduce misperceptions.…”

Framing science: How opioid research is presented in online news media

“…Understanding these framing effects is particularly important within the context of the digital media landscape, in which news stories can be found everywhere from social media feeds to email newsletters, alongside other articles, advertisements, reader comments, and more. News framing effects can be influenced by a range of contextual elements-such as the source of the message, presence of competing frames, or inclusion of visual content Gross, 2005, 2010;Arpan et al, 2009;Coleman, 2010;Bolsen et al, 2019)-as well as by readers' own knowledge, educational background, and interpretive schemas (Nelson et al, 1997;Scheufele and Scheufele, 2010;Stewart, 2013).…”

Framing the Origins of COVID-19

“…A voluminous literature demonstrates that exposure to an asymmetric one-sided frame (i.e., exposure to just one argument, see Chong & Druckman, 2007b ), such as a statement highlighting the scientific consensus on an issue, can move an audience’s beliefs in the direction of the framed message ( Bolsen & Druckman, 2018 ; Bolsen et al, 2018 ; Bolsen et al, 2019a , 2019b ; Bolsen & Shapiro, 2018 ; Lewandowsky, Gignac, & Vaughan, 2013 ; van der Linden et al, 2019 ). Individuals may learn about the origins of COVID-19 through exposure to stories that communicate either what most scientists believe (i.e., zoonotic transmission) or through exposure to conspiratorial claims (e.g., the virus was created in a research laboratory in China).…”