Perceived Influence of Proenvironmental Testimonials

ABSTRACT

Recommendations for communicators to make environmental issues more concrete in public align with the tenets of exemplification theory. Audiences may also engage with messages that they perceive as influencing them more than others, an outcome that aligns with the third-person effects framework. What is not well known is how these two areas of research intersect, namely, how exemplars about environmental issues may impact perceived message influence on the self-relative to others. This study examines the effects of testimonials on the perceived influence of environmental messages. Two experiments, each conducted simultaneously in Singapore and the Midwestern US, suggest that university students perceive themselves to be more influenced than others by proenvironmental messages. The second experiment shows that this perceptual bias is related to message desirability and individuals’ environmental values. Both experiments reveal location-specific effects, which is useful for understanding how to communicate environmental problems to global audiences.

KEYWORDS:

• Third-person effect
• first-person perception
• exemplars
• NEP
• international

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The plus-minus value for the mean difference indicates the 95% confidence interval. Throughout this manuscript and where appropriate, we report the 95% confidence interval of estimates.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a grant [M4081245.060] from the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University.