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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.
This is the 18. article in our series Trouble on the Far-Right.
When it comes to change in social environments, a parable of philosopher Charles Handy gets pulled out quickly. If you drop a frog in boiling water, it jumps out immediately; but placed in cold water slowly warming up, it acclimates itself and falls to sleep, unaware of being boiled alive. The parable reminds us of the perceptional relativity of change: Within communities creeping developments cause habituation, abrupt breaks an arousing shock. In terms of social movements this truism becomes apparent in a double way: On the one hand, erupting crises may destabilize social orders and create the necessary space for dissident actors to gain momentum – while they would fail to mobilize outside the scenario of an anxious community gasping for a new guarantor of order. On the other hand, the rise of a dissident actor with unconventional performances may work as a shock triggering withdrawal reflexes in the broader society – while dissidents with relative habitual sentiments can find resonance in communities disappointed by the ruling order.
Does this perspective offer a potential to explain the rise of far right movements in Europe? Let’s examine it by the example of Germany where, in the last two years, far right actors have experienced a remarkable gain in political acceptance – on the streets, in the booths and in the talk shows. In this case, it could be argued that their success in protest and electoral mobilizations as well as their disproportionate high presence in the media rests on communication politics that effect a normalization of far right positions previously disreputed in public discourse. Through this creeping habituation by society, they are able to gain momentum in situations of crisis, producing themselves successfully as a legitimate agent of the “anxious citizens” disappointed by the government. To test this little argument, a finger exercise in frame analysis seems to be proper, a tool common in social movement studies to explain why certain ideas in certain contexts are potent to mobilize audiences – and are not in others.
Part IV of our series "Cyberpeace: Dimensionen eines Gegenentwurfs" on cyberpeace. Matthias Schulze argues that what some perceive as cyberwar is not actually war but rather cyber conflict. The question therefore arises if this conflict will ever be solved. Ben Kamis on the other hand identifies motives in the use of language. He argues that talking about cyberpeace reinforces the impression that we are right in the middle of a cyberwar. I would not agree with that. As Johan Galtung puts it: “The use of the term ‘peace’ may in itself be peace-productive” (Galtung 1969: 167). But how do we define cyberpeace? Who should define it and how do we pursue it?...