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An empirical study on attribution effects of public message framing and its psychological mediating variables
Kyunghee Bu, Ph.D
This study investigates the psychological factors of the public message receivers for more effective message framing strategies. Attribution factors, particularly, are considered as key factors influencing the effects. Whether receivers perceive a social issue is originated from an individual members of the group or from a society as whole are sought as an independent variable, which is found significant impact on its dependent variables such as perceived risks, perceived importance/relatedness, perceived efficacy, perceived controllability, perceived victimization, and susceptibility to others. With 'Discriminant Analysis, most of these psychological variables were found significantly related to receivers' choice of certain message framing, which are pre-rated by innocent raters as emotional/rational, positive/negative. In short, The more a person attributes an issue to society problem, s/he tends to feel higher risks, susceptibility and victimization from the problem, which leads to her liking of negative message framing better than any other framing. On the other hand, when a person attribute the issue to his/her problem rather than society, s/he tends to have high perception of importance and personal relatedness to the issue, which led his preferences towards positive and rational message framing. The results of this study imply that the effective public message framing can depend on to whom the message receivers attribute the issue. |
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