Effects of Morally Reframed Arguments on Environmental Attitudes: A Message Sampling Design

Amid increasingly fraught political discourse, perhaps the most promising strategy for changing people’s attitudes and beliefs has been to convey arguments that speak to the moral values consistent with that audience’s political ideology (i.e., “moral reframing”). Although this messaging approach has generated enthusiasm among academics and practitioners, its reliability has recently been questioned. Thus, the present research tests the effectiveness and generalizability of moral reframing in the critical context of environmental communication. Whereas prior work has largely relied on convenience samples and a limited set of messages, the present work uses a nationally representative U.S. sample (N = 4,768) and a variety of arguments that vary systematically in a message sampling design. Overall, moral rhetoric that matches (vs. mismatches) a recipient’s ideology is expected to be more persuasive; however, the effect size may vary across the ostensible source of the message and the specific form of the appeal.