Are You Threatening Me? Identity Threat, Resistance to Persuasion, and Boomerang Effects in Environmental Communication

ABSTRACT

In today’s increasingly polarized political environment, people are becoming resistant to persuasive messages, which creates challenges for those communicating about environmental issues to the public. Scholars have noted that opinion-challenging information could either be ineffective or lead to boomerang effects. As a result, research has started to examine the underlying mechanism of why messages are ineffective, with a specific emphasis on boomerang effects. We conducted three experiments to examine the role of environmental identity threat as a trigger of defense mechanisms and boomerang effects. In general, our study finds that identity threat from a message leads to increased psychological reactance, counter-arguing, and anxiety. There is also evidence that boomerang effects flow through identity threat and both counter-arguing and anxiety. Our results cast light upon designing persuasive messages to encourage individuals to engage in environmental behaviors without antagonizing them.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental communication
• social identity
• identity threat
• persuasion

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Because we use the same design for all three experiments, the same power analysis would apply to all three studies. Thus, we need around 200 people for all our studies.

2 To test if the messages being utilized were viewed as being pro- or anti-environmental, we ran a pre-test of our messages on a group of undergraduate students at a large northwestern public university. We assessed whether the recycling and pipeline stories were viewed as pro- or anti-environmental. We did not include the composting story, given its similarity to our recycling story. We showed participants the messages and had them rate them on a 5-point scale of strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (5) the extent to which they believed the message was pro- or anti-environmental (measured with two separate items). Through a series of paired sample t-tests, our results found the pro-recycling story was rated as being pro-environmental (M = 4.46) compared to the anti-recycling story (M = 2.11), t (141) = 16.31, p < .05. Similarly, the pro-recycling message was rated as lower on our anti-environmental item (M = 1.76) compared to the anti-recycling story (M = 3.81), t(141) = 13.54, p < .05. Similarly, the anti-pipeline (pro-environmental) message was rated as being more pro-environmental (M = 4.01) compared to the pro-pipeline (anti-environmental) message (M = 2.65), t(141) = 8.25, p < .05. Finally, the anti-pipeline message was rated as less anti-environmental (M = 2.06) compared to the pro-pipeline message (M = 3.04), t(6.49), p < .05.

3 We ran factor analyses to determine if our measure of reactance, counter-arguing, and anxiety loaded as three separate factors. In general, results of factor analysis on our three data set suggest that these three variables load as separate factors with eigenvalues above one and factor loadings generally above five with minimal cross loadings.

4 We also examined the direct effects of our messages on our outcomes of interest. For Study 1 and Study 2, we found no direct effects of the messages on out outcomes of interest. For Study 3, we found the anti-environment message had a negative effect on our outcome (i.e., attitude toward the pipeline project), while the pro-environment message had a positive effect.