Perceived influence of proenvironmental testimonials

Recommendations for communicators to make environmental issues more concrete in public align with the tenets of exemplification theory. Audiences may also engage with messages that they perceive as influencing them more than others, an outcome that aligns with the third-person effects framework. Wha...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: ROSENTHAL, Sonny, DAHLSTROM, Michael Field
Format: text
Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2019
Subjects:
NEP
Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cis_research/187
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/cis_research/article/1186/viewcontent/Perceived_Influence_of_Proenvironmental_Testimonials.pdf
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Institution: Singapore Management University
Language: English
Description
Summary:Recommendations for communicators to make environmental issues more concrete in public align with the tenets of exemplification theory. Audiences may also engage with messages that they perceive as influencing them more than others, an outcome that aligns with the third-person effects framework. What is not well known is how these two areas of research intersect, namely, how exemplars about environmental issues may impact perceived message influence on the self-relative to others. This study examines the effects of testimonials on the perceived influence of environmental messages. Two experiments, each conducted simultaneously in Singapore and the Midwestern US, suggest that university students perceive themselves to be more influenced than others by proenvironmental messages. The second experiment shows that this perceptual bias is related to message desirability and individuals’ environmental values. Both experiments reveal location-specific effects, which is useful for understanding how to communicate environmental problems to global audiences.