Do Descriptive Norm Appeals in Public Service Ads Reduce Freedom Threats? Examining the Effects of Normative Messages and Media Literacy Skills on Decreasing Reactance

ABSTRACT

While health communication campaigns seek to encourage and promote healthy behaviors, they are not always successful. Health communication efforts may fail for several reasons, such as viewers experiencing excessive freedom threats and reactance. This study (n = 201) proposes and demonstrates that descriptive norm appeals in health PSAs can indirectly lead to enhanced behavioral intentions toward the message advocacy via reducing perceived freedom threats, inhibiting psychological reactance, and improving message credibility. However, this serial mediation was only found for message viewers with relatively low media literacy skills – precisely, who did not show considerable critical thinking toward media content. For participants who reported a high level of critical thinking toward media content, the use of descriptive norm appeals did not decrease freedom threats, nor did it indirectly affect behavioral intentions. The findings of this study contribute to the theory of psychological reactance and norms-based research. Both theoretical and practical implications are provided for health communication scholars and practitioners.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The stimuli are available upon request from the corresponding author.

2. The dataset associated with this study contains variables that would be utilized in other studies and are not included in the current work.

3. We thank our reviewers for their constructive comments. One reviewer noted that additional variables might also affect message recipients’ responses toward mask-wearing campaigns. Thus, we analyzed the same model with vaccination status, political ideology, perceived severity of COVID-19, and participants’ mask-wearing beliefs as covariates. The results of our hypothesis testing all remained the same after controlling for these variables. However, adding these variables resulted in a smaller sample (n = 197) as several participants preferred not to disclose information regarding vaccination status.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.