Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Document Number: C21598
Notes:
Pages 99-134 in Susan L. Senecah (ed.), The Environmental Communication Yearbook. Volume 1. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, New Jersey. 267 pages.
Downey, John (author), Eisenstadt, Art (author), Givens, David (author), Rogers, Floyd (author), Sanders, Frank (author), and Hilliard-Smith, Nita (author)
Format:
Book chapter
Publication Date:
1987
Published:
USA
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Document Number: C23129
Notes:
Pages 221-263 in Paul F. Nowak, Christopher C. Hamilton, Lisa V. Bardwell and Amy B. Kuras (eds.), Environmental journalism: the best from the Meeman Archive. 265 pages., Series published in the Winston-Salem Journal, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
12 pages., via online journal., Building on research in motivated reasoning and framing in science communication, we examine how messages that vary attribution of responsibility (human vs animal) and temporal orientation (now vs in the next 10 years) for wildlife disease risk influence individuals’ conservation intentions. We conducted a randomized experiment with a nationally representative sample of US adults (N = 355), which revealed that for people low in biospheric concern, messages that highlighted both human responsibility for and the imminent nature of the risk failed to enhance conservation intentions compared with messages highlighting animal responsibility. However, when messages highlighting human responsibility placed the risk in a temporally distal frame, conservation intentions increased among people low in biospheric concern. We assess the underlying mechanism of this effect and discuss the value of temporal framing in overcoming motivated skepticism to improve science communication.
