Advocating for Mask-Wearing Across the Aisle: Applying Moral Reframing in Health Communication

ABSTRACT

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States public polarized along political lines in their willingness to adopt various health-protective measures. To bridge these political divides, we tested moral reframing as a tool for advocating for wearing face masks when audiences vary in their moral priorities. We additionally address a gap in prior moral reframing research by comparing responses to a topic-relevant non-moral appeal. Across two studies, we examined effects on perceived message effectiveness, intentions to wear masks, support for a nationwide mask mandate, and willingness to share messages on social media. We find support for the efficacy of ideology-matched moral arguments and generally find support for the boomerang effect of ideology-mismatched moral arguments. However, these effects were restricted to relatively liberal audiences; politically conservative message recipients did not differentiate between message conditions. We discuss these asymmetric effects and their implications for theory in moral rhetoric.

Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. Thomas Holtgraves for feedback on this project. Study 1 was completed for the second author’s undergraduate honors thesis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2022.2163535

Notes

1. Kidwell et al. (2013) incorporated a relevant non-moral message as a control condition in their studies, but three of these studies collected data for this condition post-hoc. Because participants were not randomly assigned to the control versus experimental conditions, unmeasured sampling variables could confound the conclusions one can draw. In their fourth experiment, they implemented this control condition in the main study but do not report simple slopes analyses.

2. Although this minor exclusion did not change the statistical significance of many results, it did strengthen some results that would otherwise have been nonsignificant. We report statistical analyses of the full sample without exclusions in the online supplement for transparency.

3. For transparency, we acknowledge that we also measured social dominance orientation and right-wing authoritarianism as exploratory variables. See the online supplement for a rationale and full analyses of these ancillary variables.

4. As a robustness check to guard against potential issues with ceiling effects, we also tested the ideology $\times$ message interactions on intentions and attitudes using binomial logistic regression models, dichotomizing these outcomes by whether or not participants selected the most extremely pro-mask response option. Results of these models reveal a marginally significant interaction on intentions and significant interaction on attitudes. See the online supplement for full analyses.

5. Indeed, some participants left feedback to this effect in a final invitation for open-ended comments. For example, one respondent wrote: “Although I don’t believe that blurb was very persuasive or convincing, I do believe everyone regardless should be wearing masks when out in public spaces.” Such sentiment reinforces the utility of examining perceived message effectiveness in a context of high exposure to such messages in the environment.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by two research awards from Ball State University: the ASPiRE Student Research Grant and the ASPiRE Junior Faculty Research Award.