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

战略传播者越来越感兴趣的是如何激励公众和政策制定者采取行动，消除对人类和地球健康的明显威胁。为了鼓励公民参与健康和环境问题，传播者将受益于探索超越对问题的信息描述的信息传递战略，以在情感层面上吸引受众。为此，本研究探索了具有说服力的愤怒诉求的可行性。根据说服理论，激怒的信息不仅必须激起愤怒以改变态度和行为；它们还必须灌输对采取行动的有效性的信念。然而，对于这些功效信念意味着什么，这一理论一直不够准确。因为愤怒往往会激发对被认为做错事的人进行报复的欲望，所以当听众相信某个特定的行动会惩罚作恶者时，愤怒可能会对说服力产生最大的影响，研究人员将这一新概念称为惩罚效果。因此，我们预计愤怒呼吁最有效的时候是唤起人们对这些伤害的罪魁祸首的愤怒，然后传达建议的回应将如何有效地惩罚违规者。在审查具有说服力的愤怒诉求时，研究人员使用了两个问题，对问题的严重性和集体解决方案的必要性有科学共识。三项研究考察了如何设计信息，以利用对感知到的不公正的愤怒(称为道德愤怒)，以及如何将这种情绪转化为激进主义。研究1使用横断面调查设计来验证所提出的报应效能的测量方法。研究2和研究3建立在第一个研究的基础上，通过实验测试灌输道德愤怒和惩罚效果的信息。此外，研究3探讨了在接触这类信息的过程中，激起的愤怒会在多大程度上暂时性地演变--一种称为情绪流动的现象。研究结果为风险沟通者提供了直接的、在理论上知情的指导，指导他们如何制定最有效的劝说愤怒的诉求。这项研究还有助于我们从理论上理解愤怒诉求，与其他情感诉求(如恐惧或幽默)相比，愤怒诉求受到的学术关注要少得多。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.