TY  - JOUR
A1  - Zey, Elli
A1  - Windmann, Sabine
T1  - Effects of message framing, sender authority, and recipients' self-reported trait autonomy on endorsement of health and safety measures during the early COVID-19 pandemic
T2  - International journal of environmental research and public health
N2  - In the COVID-19 pandemic, human solidarity plays a crucial role in meeting this maybe greatest modern societal challenge. Public health communication targets enhancing collective compliance with protective health and safety regulations. Here, we asked whether authoritarian/controlling message framing as compared to a neutral message framing may be more effective than moralizing/prosocial message framing and whether recipients’ self-rated trait autonomy might lessen these effects. In a German sample (n = 708), we measured approval of seven regulations (e.g., reducing contact, wearing a mask) before and after presenting one of three Twitter messages (authoritarian, moralizing, neutral/control) presented by either a high-authority sender (state secretary) or a low-authority sender (social worker). We found that overall, the messages successfully increased participants’ endorsement of the regulations, but only weakly so because of ceiling effects. Highly autonomous participants showed more consistent responses across the two measurements, i.e., lower response shifting, in line with the concept of reactive autonomy. Specifically, when the sender was a social worker, response shifting correlated negatively with trait autonomy. We suggest that a trusted sender encourages more variable responses to imposed societal regulations in individuals low in autonomy, and we discuss several aspects that may improve health communication.
KW  - autonomy
KW  - morality
KW  - authority
KW  - prosocial behavior
KW  - framing
KW  - messaging
KW  - COVID-19 regulations
KW  - social distancing
Y1  - 2021
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/61966
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-619663
SN  - 1660-4601
VL  - 18
IS  - 15, art. 7740
SP  - 1
EP  - 12
PB  - MDPI
CY  - Basel
ER  -