Deeper Processing Is Associated With Support for Policies to Reduce Obesity

Abstract

Health communication researchers have become increasingly interested in factors that predict support for health-related policy. Previous studies have shown that judgments about issues that are influenced by political ideology can be modified by the depth with which receivers process messages related to that issue. In this study, we test whether the same pattern is found for causal attributions about obesity and, ultimately, support for policies to reduce obesity. A national, random sample of U.S. adults read a story about both individual and societal causes of obesity. The longer the time participants spent on the study, and the more words they generated in a thought-listing procedure (operationalizations of depth of processing), the more likely participants were to support policies to reduce obesity, a traditionally liberal position. The same measures of depth of processing did not influence causal explanation of obesity overall, but the more time political moderates spent on the study, the more likely they were to both attribute societal explanations for obesity’s causes and to support policies to combat obesity. We conclude with a discussion of this study’s application to health communication campaigns and future research directions.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Funding was provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation via a grant to the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute entitled Mobilizing Action Toward Community Health (MATCH). We are grateful to Hye Kyung (Kay) Kim for her valuable assistance with data cleaning.

Notes

1. ¹In all analyses, education was included as a control variable. We also tested for interaction effects between education and political ideology and depth of processing measures (i.e., duration and word count); however, none of these interaction terms was statistically significant in predicting policy support.