Red, white, and blue enough to be green: Effects of moral framing on climate change attitudes and conservation behaviors

Deciphering Discord: How Conflicting Information and Political Ideology Shape Public Attitude Toward PFAS Regulation

Per- and polyfluorinated substances (PFAS) contamination is an emerging environmental and health risk facing the world. This study examines the impact of conflicting information on Americans' attitude toward PFAS regulation and intention to engage in mitigation behaviors through a one-way, between-subjects experiment. Participants were 1,062 U.S. adults recruited from CloudResearch. Results showed that compared to participants exposed to consistent information, those exposed to conflicting information displayed less favorable attitude toward existing regulation, which led to lower intention to support related policies and to engage in mitigation behaviors. Political ideology moderated these relationships, with stronger experimental effects among conservatives. These findings underscore the importance of conveying consistent risk messages, especially when multiple stakeholders are involved.

The differential impact of climate interventions along the political divide in 60 countries

A major barrier to climate change mitigation is the political polarization of climate change beliefs. In a global experiment conducted in 60 countries (N = 51,224), we assess the differential impact of eleven climate interventions across the ideological divide. At baseline, we find political polarization of climate change beliefs and policy support globally, with people who reported being liberal believing and supporting climate policy more than those who reported being conservative (Cohen's d = 0.35 and 0.27, respectively). However, we find no evidence for a statistically significant difference between these groups in their engagement in a behavioral tree planting task. This conceptual-behavioral polarization incongruence results from self-identified conservatives acting despite not believing, rather than self-identified liberals not acting on their beliefs. We also find three interventions (emphasizing effective collective actions, writing a letter to a future generation member, and writing a letter from the future self) boost climate beliefs and policy support across the ideological spectrum, and one intervention (emphasizing scientific consensus) stimulates the climate action of people identifying as liberal. None of the interventions tested show evidence for a statistically significant boost in climate action for self-identified conservatives. We discuss implications for practitioners deploying targeted climate interventions.

"It's My Moral Responsibility to Protect Others!" Examining the Effects of Moral Framing and Message Format on Influenza Vaccination Attitude and Intention

Vaccinations serve a dual purpose: safeguarding the vaccinated individuals while also preventing potential transmission to others. However, the pro-vaccine message has primarily emphasized the personal health risks and harms of not getting vaccinated, while rarely highlighting the moral responsibility of getting vaccinated to protect others. Guided by the Model of Intuitive Morality and Exemplars (MIME) along with the narrative persuasion framework, the current study conducted a 2 (moral framing: vaccination to protect oneself vs. protect others) X 2 (message format: statistical vs. narrative) between-subject online experiment to examine the effects of moral framing and message format on vaccination decision-making. The results revealed that individuals exposed to a pro-vaccine message framing vaccination as a moral responsibility to protect others from harm reported significantly higher levels of perceived moral responsibility and elevation, more positive attitudes toward the flu vaccine, and an increased intention to get vaccinated compared to a pro-vaccine message emphasizing vaccination for self-protection. Counterintuitively, presenting the moral responsibility of receiving the flu vaccine to safeguard others in a statistical format was discovered to be more effective in fostering favorable attitudes toward vaccination and increasing the intention to get vaccinated. This study offers a valuable insight: promoting vaccination as a moral duty could be a promising strategy for motivating individuals to get vaccinated.

Advocating for Mask-Wearing Across the Aisle: Applying Moral Reframing in Health Communication

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States public polarized along political lines in their willingness to adopt various health-protective measures. To bridge these political divides, we tested moral reframing as a tool for advocating for wearing face masks when audiences vary in their moral priorities. We additionally address a gap in prior moral reframing research by comparing responses to a topic-relevant non-moral appeal. Across two studies, we examined effects on perceived message effectiveness, intentions to wear masks, support for a nationwide mask mandate, and willingness to share messages on social media. We find support for the efficacy of ideology-matched moral arguments and generally find support for the boomerang effect of ideology-mismatched moral arguments. However, these effects were restricted to relatively liberal audiences; politically conservative message recipients did not differentiate between message conditions. We discuss these asymmetric effects and their implications for theory in moral rhetoric.

Intergenerational altruism and climate policy preferences

Climate mitigation constitutes an intergenerational moral dilemma; the decisions we make today will inevitably shape the prospects for generations to come. Yet, we still know little about the relationship between intergenerational altruism (IGA)-our concerns for the well-being of future generations-and support for costly climate mitigation policies. In this study, we present an approach to measuring IGA through an intergenerational dilemma, where participants allocate resources across generations. First, we describe how IGA depends on the temporal (social) distance between generations and demonstrate robust correlations between IGA and support for several climate policies. Then, we leverage randomized participation in the intergenerational dilemma to show that it causally increases climate policy support, an effect we attribute to higher worries about human-induced climate change among treated subjects. An exploratory heterogeneity analysis suggests that the impact of the intergenerational dilemma is primarily driven by female and nonbinary participants. In sum, this study presents both a novel measurement strategy and robust evidence of a malleable moral basis of climate policy preferences.

The paradox of pandemic mitigation? Moderating role of pandemic severity on the impact of social distancing policies: a cultural value perspective

BACKGROUND

Social distancing policies were of utmost importance during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. These policies aimed to mitigate the severity of local outbreaks by altering public behavior. However, if the severity of the pandemic reduces, the impact of these policies on actual behavior may decrease. This study aims to examine, from a global perspective, whether the impact of social distancing policies on actual mobility is moderated by local pandemic severity and whether this moderating effect varies across cultural value contexts.

METHODS

We combined multiple publicly available global datasets for structural equation model analysis. 17,513 rows of data from 57 countries included in all databases were analyzed. Multilevel moderated moderation models were constructed to test the hypotheses.

RESULTS

More stringent policies in a region mean less regional mobility (β = -0.572, p < 0.001). However, the severity of local outbreaks negatively moderated this effect (β = -0.114, p < 0.001). When the pandemic was not severe, the influence of policy intensity on mobility weakened. Furthermore, based on Schwartz's cultural values theory, cultural values of autonomy (β = -0.109, p = 0.011), and egalitarianism (β = -0.108, p = 0.019) reinforced the moderating effect of pandemic severity. On the other hand, cultural values of embeddedness (β = 0.119, p = 0.006) and hierarchy (β = 0.096, p = 0.029) attenuated the moderating effect.

CONCLUSIONS

Social distancing policies aim to reduce the severity of local pandemics; however, the findings reveal that mitigating local pandemics may reduce their impact. Future policymakers should be alert to this phenomenon and introduce appropriate incentives to respond. The results also show that the moderating role of pandemic severity varies across cultures. When policies are promoted to deal with global crises, policymakers must seriously consider the resistance and potential incentives of cultural values.

Addressing climate change with behavioral science: A global intervention tournament in 63 countries

Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting behavioral task. Across 59,440 participants from 63 countries, the interventions' effectiveness was small, largely limited to nonclimate skeptics, and differed across outcomes: Beliefs were strengthened mostly by decreasing psychological distance (by 2.3%), policy support by writing a letter to a future-generation member (2.6%), information sharing by negative emotion induction (12.1%), and no intervention increased the more effortful behavior-several interventions even reduced tree planting. Last, the effects of each intervention differed depending on people's initial climate beliefs. These findings suggest that the impact of behavioral climate interventions varies across audiences and target behaviors.

Psychological inoculation strategies to fight climate disinformation across 12 countries

Decades after the scientific debate about the anthropogenic causes of climate change was settled, climate disinformation still challenges the scientific evidence in public discourse. Here we present a comprehensive theoretical framework of (anti)science belief formation and updating to account for the psychological factors that influence the acceptance or rejection of scientific messages. We experimentally investigated, across 12 countries (N = 6,816), the effectiveness of six inoculation strategies targeting these factors-scientific consensus, trust in scientists, transparent communication, moralization of climate action, accuracy and positive emotions-to fight real-world disinformation about climate science and mitigation actions. While exposure to disinformation had strong detrimental effects on participants' climate change beliefs (δ = -0.16), affect towards climate mitigation action (δ = -0.33), ability to detect disinformation (δ = -0.14) and pro-environmental behaviour (δ = -0.24), we found almost no evidence for protective effects of the inoculations (all δ < 0.20). We discuss the implications of these findings and propose ways forward to fight climate disinformation.

Soundscapes of morality: Linking music preferences and moral values through lyrics and audio

Music is a fundamental element in every culture, serving as a universal means of expressing our emotions, feelings, and beliefs. This work investigates the link between our moral values and musical choices through lyrics and audio analyses. We align the psychometric scores of 1,480 participants to acoustics and lyrics features obtained from the top 5 songs of their preferred music artists from Facebook Page Likes. We employ a variety of lyric text processing techniques, including lexicon-based approaches and BERT-based embeddings, to identify each song's narrative, moral valence, attitude, and emotions. In addition, we extract both low- and high-level audio features to comprehend the encoded information in participants' musical choices and improve the moral inferences. We propose a Machine Learning approach and assess the predictive power of lyrical and acoustic features separately and in a multimodal framework for predicting moral values. Results indicate that lyrics and audio features from the artists people like inform us about their morality. Though the most predictive features vary per moral value, the models that utilised a combination of lyrics and audio characteristics were the most successful in predicting moral values, outperforming the models that only used basic features such as user demographics, the popularity of the artists, and the number of likes per user. Audio features boosted the accuracy in the prediction of empathy and equality compared to textual features, while the opposite happened for hierarchy and tradition, where higher prediction scores were driven by lyrical features. This demonstrates the importance of both lyrics and audio features in capturing moral values. The insights gained from our study have a broad range of potential uses, including customising the music experience to meet individual needs, music rehabilitation, or even effective communication campaign crafting.

Social Psychological Perspectives on Political Polarization: Insights and Implications for Climate Change

Political polarization is a barrier to enacting policy solutions to global issues. Social psychology has a rich history of studying polarization, and there is an important opportunity to define and refine its contributions to the present political realities. We do so in the context of one of the most pressing modern issues: climate change. We synthesize the literature on political polarization and its applications to climate change, and we propose lines of further research and intervention design. We focus on polarization in the United States, examining other countries when literature was available. The polarization literature emphasizes two types of mechanisms of political polarization: (1) individual-level psychological processes related to political ideology and (2) group-level psychological processes related to partisan identification. Interventions that address group-level processes can be more effective than those that address individual-level processes. Accordingly, we emphasize the promise of interventions leveraging superordinate identities, correcting misperceived norms, and having trusted leaders communicate about climate change. Behavioral interventions like these that are grounded in scientific research are one of our most promising tools to achieve the behavioral wedge that we need to address climate change and to make progress on other policy issues.

Understanding Associations of Personal Values With Support for Tobacco and Alcohol Control Policies

INTRODUCTION

This cross-sectional analysis of the 2020 Health Information National Trends Survey (N=3,604) examines the associations of personal values with tobacco and alcohol control policy support, which may inform policy-related communication efforts.

METHODS

Respondents selected which of 7 value options they considered most important in their daily life and rated their support for 8 proposed tobacco and alcohol control policies (1=strongly oppose, 5=strongly support). Weighted proportions for each value were described across sociodemographic characteristics, smoking status, and alcohol use. Weighted bivariate and multivariable regressions tested the associations of values with mean policy support (alpha=0.89). Analyses occurred from 2021 to 2022.

RESULTS

The most frequently selected values were assuring my family is safe and secure (30.2%), being happy (21.1%), and making my own decisions (13.6%). Selected values varied across sociodemographic and behavioral characteristics. For example, people with lower education and incomes were overrepresented among those selecting making my own decisions and keeping myself in good health. After adjusting for sociodemographics, smoking, and alcohol use, people selecting family safety (β=0.20, 95% CI=0.06, 0.33) or religious connection (β=0.34, 95% CI=0.14, 0.54) as most important reported higher policy support than those selecting making their own decisions, the value associated with the lowest mean policy support. Mean policy support did not significantly differ across any other value comparisons.

CONCLUSIONS

Personal values are associated with support for alcohol and tobacco control policies, with making my own decisions associated with the lowest policy support. Future research and communication efforts may consider aligning tobacco and alcohol control policies with the idea of supporting autonomy.

Effects of Moral Frames Within Vaping Prevention Messages on Current smokers' Support for Electronic Cigarette Regulations

Given the rise of communication campaigns to prevent and reduce the use of electronic nicotine delivery systems among minors nationwide, it is important to examine whether certain preventive messages will spill over to affect current adult smokers' support for and compliance with vaping regulations. Drawing upon the Moral Foundations Theory, the current study experimentally examined the effects of moral frames on current adult smokers' support for vape-free policies and marketing restrictions. An online sample of current smokers (N = 630) was randomly assigned to a 3 (moral frames in vaping prevention : care, purity, non-moral control) × 2 (priming of anti-smoking messages: yes or no) between-subject survey experiment. Compared with non-moral framed messages, smokers exposed to both care and purity framed messages were more likely to support vape-free policies in public places. Such effects were stronger for smokers with higher pre-treatment endorsement of the purity value, driven less by anger or disgust but more by smokers' updating of both self-oriented and secondhand harm perceptions. Moral frames, especially those appealing to care and purity moral values, are thus promising messaging strategies for vaping prevention communication campaigns in terms of increasing current smokers' support for vape-free policies. The results also help improve our understanding of the moral roots of health policy opinions and the potential of deploying moral framing to improve message design for health campaigns.

Why is Mother Earth on Life Support? Metaphors in Environmental Discourse

From mother nature and carbon footprints to greenhouse gasses and the race against global warming, popular discourse on environmental issues is saturated with metaphor. Some people view these metaphors as obfuscating or ineffective, while others believe they are crucial for improving climate communications and environmental attitudes. In this paper, we provide a systematic overview and evaluation of the use of English metaphors in Anglo environmental discourse, drawing on a range of empirical and popular media sources. We begin by discussing the role of metaphor in language in thought. Next, we introduce a range of metaphors used to frame discussions of (1) our relationship to nature (e.g., the earth is our common home), (2) our impact on the environment (e.g., we are knocking the climate off balance), and (3) how we should address this impact (e.g., reduce our ecological footprint). We classify these metaphors along several dimensions, including how conventional they are, how systemic they are, how emotionally impactful they are, and how aptly they capture the topics they are used to describe. From this analysis, we derive several promising candidate metaphors that may help increase public understanding and engagement with environmental issues. However, we note that such claims must be tested empirically in future research; currently, there are few large, systematic, replicable experiments in the literature assessing the impact of environmental metaphors. We conclude by offering general recommendations for using metaphors in communications about climate change and sustainability.

Twitter as research data Tools, costs, skill sets, and lessons learned

Scholars increasingly use Twitter data to study the life sciences and politics. However, Twitter data collection tools often pose challenges for scholars who are unfamiliar with their operation. Equally important, although many tools indicate that they offer representative samples of the full Twitter archive, little is known about whether the samples are indeed representative of the targeted population of tweets. This article evaluates such tools in terms of costs, training, and data quality as a means to introduce Twitter data as a research tool. Further, using an analysis of COVID-19 and moral foundations theory as an example, we compared the distributions of moral discussions from two commonly used tools for accessing Twitter data (Twitter's standard APIs and third-party access) to the ground truth, the Twitter full archive. Our results highlight the importance of assessing the comparability of data sources to improve confidence in findings based on Twitter data. We also review the major new features of Twitter's API version 2.

Do environmental messages emphasising binding morals promote conservatives’ pro-environmentalism? A pre-registered replication