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How Motivated Reasoning And Temporal Frames May Polarize Opinions About Wildlife Disease Risk, Sungjong Roh, Katherine A. Mccomas, Laura N. Rickard, Daniel J. Decker

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We draw from theories of motivated reasoning, dual-processing models, and attribution of responsibility to examine how scientific messages may increase public polarization with respect to emerging risk issues such as Lyme disease. A nationally representative sample of Americans (N = 460) read messages about Lyme disease that varied the framing of responsibility for the prevalence of the disease (human/wildlife vs. wildlife only) and when its effects will occur (today vs. in the next 10 years). The influence of framing was contingent on participants’ partisanship, which resulted in a boomerang effect among Republicans and increased the degree of political polarization regarding …