Doctoral Dissertation Research in DRMS: Harnessing Anger to Promote Activism: Exploring the Efficacy and Emotional Flow of Persuasive Anger Appeals

DRMS 博士论文研究：利用愤怒促进行动主义：探索说服性愤怒诉求的功效和情感流动

• 批准号: 1824212
• 负责人: Jeffrey Niederdeppe
• 金额: $ 2.71万
• 依托单位: Cornell University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2018-06-15 至 2019-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1824212&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; DRMS; Harnessing

Strategic communicators are increasingly interested in ways to galvanize the public and policymakers to take action to offset clear threats to human and planetary health. To motivate civic engagement with health and environmental issues, communicators would benefit from exploring messaging strategies that go beyond informational portrayals of an issue to engage audiences on an emotional level. To this end, this research explores the viability of persuasive anger appeals. According to persuasion theory, anger-arousing messages must not only evoke anger in order to change attitudes and behaviors; they must also instill beliefs about the efficacy of taking action. The theory, however, has been imprecise about what those efficacy beliefs entail. Because anger tends to motivate a desire to retaliate against a perceived wrongdoer, it follows that anger may have the strongest effects on persuasive outcomes when the audience believes that a particular action will punish the wrongdoer, a new concept the researchers call retributive efficacy. As such, we expect an anger appeal to be most effective when it evokes anger toward culprits of these harms and then communicates how a recommended response will effectively punish the offender. In examining persuasive anger appeals, the researchers use two issues for which there is scientific consensus about the magnitude of the problem and the need for collective solutions. Three studies examine how to design messages that harness anger about perceived injustices (referred to as moral anger) and how to translate that emotion into activism. Study 1 uses a cross-sectional survey design to validate a proposed measure of retributive efficacy. Studies 2 and 3 build on the first study by experimentally testing messages that instill moral anger and retributive efficacy. Additionally, study 3 explores the extent to which evoked anger temporally evolves during exposure to such messages -- a phenomenon called emotional flow. Study findings offer risk communicators direct, theory-informed guidance on how to craft maximally effective persuasive appeals to anger. The research also contribute to our theoretical understanding of anger appeals, which have received far less scholarly attention than appeals to other emotions like fear or humor.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

战略沟通者越来越感兴趣，以使公共和决策者采取行动以抵消对人类和行星健康的明显威胁。为了激发公民与健康和环境问题的参与，沟通者将受益于探索消息传递策略，这些策略超出了有关问题的信息描述，可以在情感上吸引观众。为此，这项研究探讨了有说服力的愤怒吸引力的可行性。根据说服理论，激怒的信息不仅必须引起愤怒，以改变态度和行为。他们还必须灌输对采取行动的功效的信念。然而，该理论对这些功效信念的含义不精确。因为愤怒倾向于激励人们对被感知到的不法行为者进行报复的愿望，所以愤怒可能会对有说服力的结果产生最大的影响，而当观众认为特定的行动会惩罚不法行为者，这是研究人员称之为报应性效能的新概念。因此，当愤怒引起对这些危害的罪魁祸首的愤怒，然后传达建议的反应将如何有效地惩罚罪犯时，我们期望愤怒的吸引力最有效。在检查说服力的愤怒吸引力时，研究人员使用了两个问题，这些问题就问题的幅度和集体解决方案的需求得以科学共识。三项研究研究了如何设计信息，以利用对感知的不公正现象（称为道德愤怒）以及如何将这种情感转化为行动主义的信息。研究1使用横截面调查设计来验证提出的报应疗效的量度。研究2和3通过实验测试灌输道德愤怒和报应疗效的信息建立在第一个研究的基础上。此外，研究3探讨了在暴露于此类信息期间唤起愤怒在时间上演变的程度 - 这种现象称为情绪流动。研究结果提供了有关如何最大程度地有效说服力呼吁愤怒的直接，理论信息的指导。这项研究还为我们对愤怒吸引力的理论理解做出了贡献，与恐惧或幽默等其他情绪的吸引力相比，这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并且被认为是通过基金会的智力优点和更广泛的影响来审查标准，这反映了NSF的法定任务。