Author(s)

Hongxiao Yu

Corresponding Author

Hongxiao Yu

ABSTRACT

In the past decade, there are increasing interests in changing the public’s cognitions and behaviors on environmental issues. Message framing can be an effective tool to influence environmental protection attitudes, intentions and behavior. However, past studies investigating the effectiveness of message framing in promoting environmental protection behavior have mostly examined this in offline contexts, and it is unknown whether online message framing could influence people’s attitudes and intentions towards environmental protection. In the current study, we investigated whether the framing of online messages could shift people’s attitude to support environmental protection organizations and increase intention to donate to eco-friendly causes. Two-hundred and one U.S. participants were recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk to participate in an online study. The results indicated that positive, but not negative, message framing could promote individuals’ attitudes concerning environmental protection and increase their intentions to donate to eco-friendly groups. The results of our study were consistent with piror research in offline contexts, and suggests that message framing could successfully influence people’s attitudes in computer mediated communication. From a practical perspective, given that online message framing is a low-cost intervention strategy that can be applied at scale, our finds support that message framing has the potential to make a great contribution to our society and environment by shifting people’s environmental attitudes.

KEYWORDS

Eco-friendly, message framing, intention, attitude, online, environmental protection, Interventions