Abstract 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.

中文翻译：

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环境行动的信息传递：道德框架和信息来源的作用

摘要 政治自由党和保守党在环境问题上的分歧似乎正在扩大，自由党普遍比保守党更亲环境。我们建议，环境信息的共同框架往往会使这些差距永久化。我们设计了两个实验来检验这一假设，并探索使用基于道德基础理论的交流来缩小这些分歧的前景。道德基础理论认为，人们直觉地用来形成判断的至少有五种普遍的道德关注点。研究发现，美国的政治自由主义者倾向于仅将他们的判断和沟通建立在其中两个基础上，而保守党则强调所有五个基础。我们制作了两条环保信息，一个使用自由主义道德语言（基于两个自由道德基础）构建，另一个使用保守道德语言（基于所有五个道德基础）。通过使用两个独立样本的调查研究，我们比较了政治党派在从自由派、保守派或无党派信息来源传达信息时如何回应信息。我们发现保守的信息比自由的信息更能引起保守党的共鸣，尤其是当与保守的信息来源结合时。此外，即使与保守的消息来源相结合，保守的框架信息也不会疏远自由派参与者。因此，