The joint effect of descriptive social norms and anticipated emotion on distal benefit behavior : proposing emotional descriptive norms messages (EDNMs) based on message design approach using verbal and visual cues

This dissertation describes research which applies theory from the fields of communication and social psychology to create and test persuasive messages aimed at increasing public engagement with recycling. Recycling is a pro-environmental behavior which is often costly on front end but provides distal benefits. Although people often acknowledge the necessity of this behavior, they do not always follow through due to the uncertainty and ambiguity resulting from distal benefits. Accordingly, various persuasion tactics such as social norms have been utilized to motivate people to engage in socially desirable distal behavior, recycling. As an effort to increase the applicability of social norms in the context of pro-environmental behaviors, this dissertation proposed a new message design strategy, an emotional social norms message, by incorporating future-oriented discrete emotions, in particular, anticipated pride, into a standard social norms message to demonstrate if emotions enhance norm-congruent behaviors. Specifically, the current study tested whether exposure to emotional descriptive norms messages (EDNMs), which contain both descriptive norms information and anticipated pride appeal, influences emotional, attitudinal, and behavioral outcomes relative to standard descriptive norms messages (SDNMs), which contain only descriptive norms information. Further, the current study examined the underlying mechanism and boundary condition of the emotional descriptive norms messages (EDNM) processing with anticipation of emotional outcome as a mediator and behavioral privacy as a moderator in the relationship between exposure to EDNMs and behavioral intentions. An online experiment was conducted using a 2 (anticipated pride: presence vs. absence) x 2 (order of presentation) x 2 (behavioral privacy: private vs. public) pre- and post-test between-subject design with a control group. The number of 280 participants, a nationally representative sample of the U.S., were recruited. The results showed that participants who viewed the EDNMs experienced greater anticipated pride than those who viewed the SDNMs. Further, anticipated pride mediated the effects of EDNMs on intention to recycle and intention to talk about recycling with their family such that EDNMs elicited greater anticipated pride, which led to greater intention to recycle and intention to talk compared to did SDNMs.