Communicating Inequalities to Enhance Support for Obesity-Prevention Policies: The Role of Social Comparisons, Age Frames, and Emotion

ABSTRACT

With certain populations in the United States at higher risk for obesity than other populations, public health advocates have attempted to draw attention to these inequalities to galvanize support for obesity-mitigation policies. Yet research comparing different messages about social inequalities indicates that not all social comparisons are persuasive. Drawing on Weiner’s (1986) theory of perceived responsibility and social motivation, I experimentally tested promising message frames about obesity disparities. Participants (N = 653) read one of six messages following a 3 (social comparison frame: geographic vs. racial vs. no-comparison) × 2 (age frame: child vs. adult) between-subjects design. Unexpectedly, geographic frames (rural/urban) indirectly decreased policy support relative to the control frame by way of increased counterarguing. Compared to adult frames about obesity inequalities, childhood frames evoked more sympathy and less internal attribution, which in turn positively predicted support for obesity-prevention policies. Practical and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Health disparities
• obesity
• message framing
• theory of perceived responsibility and social motivation
• emotion

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Poppy McLeod, Sue Fussell, and the Cornell Risk Communication Lab for feedback on early drafts of the paper.

Funding

Special thanks to Jeff Niederdeppe for project funding and guidance.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

¹ Attributions of causal responsibility are distinct from attributions of treatment responsibility—that is, perceptions of who or what is responsible for addressing the issue (Iyengar, 1991). I focus on the former type of attribution in this paper.

² Although emotion theorists contend that compassion is a more appropriate term for the feeling state associated with the concept of sympathy (see Haidt, 2003), I use the term sympathy in this paper to be consistent with the language used in the theory of perceived responsibility and social motivation.

³ Although it would have been ideal to include an income frame in this experiment in addition to the geographic and racial frames, it was not possible to do so. All obesity disparities tested in the messages had to be (a) statistically different and (b) in the same direction across age frames and social comparison frames. In the case of income inequalities, children of families above the poverty line are at lower risk for obesity than children of families near or below the poverty line (CDC, 2015), whereas most obese adults are not of low income (National Center for Health Statistics, 2010).

Additional information

Funding

Special thanks to Jeff Niederdeppe for project funding and guidance.