Messaging for environmental action: The role of moral framing and message source

Divisions between political Liberals and Conservatives on environmental issues seem to be widening, with Liberals generally more pro-environmental than Conservatives. We propose that common framing of environmental messages tends to perpetuate these gaps. We designed two experiments to examine this assumption and explore the prospects of narrowing these divisions using communication based on moral foundations theory. Moral foundations theory posits that there are at least five universal moral concerns that people intuitively use to form judgments. Research has found that political Liberals in the United States tend to base their judgments and communication on only two of these foundations, while Conservatives stress all five. We crafted two pro-environmental messages, one framed using liberal moral language (based on the two liberal moral foundations), the other using conservative moral language (based on all five moral foundations). Through survey research using two separate samples, we compared how political partisans responded to the messages when they were communicated from a liberal, conservative or nonpartisan message source. We found that the conservatively framed message resonated more with Conservatives than the liberally framed message, especially when combined with a conservative message source. Further, the conservatively framed message did not alienate liberal participants, even when combined with a conservative source. Thus, combining conservative framing (based on all five moral foundations) and conservative message sources in environmental messaging is likely to be more persuasive than relying on traditional liberal messaging or liberal sources.