Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Public Understanding Of One Health Messages: The Role Of Temporal Framing, Sungjong Roh, Laura N. Rickard, Katherine A. Mccomas, Daniel J. Decker

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

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 …