An Examination of Expertise, Caring and Salient Value Similarity as Source Factors that Garner Support for Advocated Climate Policies

ABSTRACT

Emerging research has demonstrated that the effects of climate change communication are influenced by the message recipient’s perceptions of the message source. In the present study, we extend this previous work into a domain wrought with inferred communicator biases, policy advocacy. Competence and character enhancing source factors, expertise, perceived caring, and salient value similarity are manipulated to assess their impact on one’s likelihood to support a policy advocated by the source. Results from this online experiment (N = 397) suggest that a climate change policy advocate increased policy support when the advocate was described as (a) caring about people like the participant (vs. not caring) and (b) sharing the participants’ salient values for environmental protection (vs. not sharing their salient values). In contrast, policy support was not influenced by information about the advocate’s expertise. These findings provide initial evidence that communication efforts may need to consider source factors beyond expertise and particularly, those related to trusting one’s character when advocating climate policies. Further, such efforts may be most effective when tailored according to values individuals’ associate with a specific environmental issue or situation.

KEYWORDS:

• Source factors
• environmental communication
• climate policy advocacy
• expertise
• caring
• salient value similarity

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the members of the first author’s dissertation committee (Janet Swim, Jonathan Cook, Mel Mark, & Lee Ahern) and James Shanahan for providing critical feedback.

Disclosure statement

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

Ethical standards

All research was approved by the Institutional Review Board at Penn State University. This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors. All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments. All survey respondents provided implied consent.

Notes

1 Response options did not align perfectly: whereas polls use a five-point scale, here we used a 7-point scale and categorized those who identified as “somewhat liberal” or “somewhat conservative” as moderate.

2 Despite concerns that professors might not be universally trusted, previous work (Callaghan & Schnell, 2009) suggests that professors are viewed overall as high-credibility experts.

3 Listing the first, second and third values in that order might have provided a stronger manipulation; however, we avoided this this exact match order out of concern that it would make the deception transparent to participants.

4 Previous work [Authors] demonstrates that individuals’ support for climate policies have both policy-specific and policy-nonspecific components, and that policy-nonspecific components explain approximately one-third of individuals’ overall support for a particular policy. Thus, the present work verifies that effects are not due to a specific policy.

5 Policy support is commonly measured using a single item (e.g., Van Boven et al., 2018), or a single item per policy (Bouman et al., 2020; Geiger et al., 2021). We used a two-item measure to enhance reliability.

6 For two-item measures, the Spearman-Brown reliability coefficient has been argued to be most appropriate (Eisinga et al., 2013). Using Cronbach’s alpha provides a similar result.

Additional information

Funding

This research was partially supported by funding from the Penn State Psychology Department.