There is much need to verify the robustness of published findings in the field of communication—particularly regarding the effects of persuasive emotional appeals about social issues. To this end, we present the results from a preregistered, direct replication of C. Skurka, J. Niederdeppe, R. Romero-Canyas, and D. Acup (2018). The original study found that a threat appeal about climate change can increase risk perception and activism intentions and that a humor appeal can also increase activism intentions with a large sample of young adults. Using the same stimuli, measures, and experimental design with a similar sample, we fail to replicate these main effects. We do, however, replicate age as a moderator of humor’s effect on perceived risk, such that the humor appeal only persuaded emerging adults (ages 18–21.9). We consider several explanations for our discrepant findings, including the challenges (and opportunities) that persuasion researchers must navigate when communicating about rapidly evolving social issues.

中文翻译：

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情感诉求、气候变化和年轻人：Skurka 等人的直接复制。(2018)

非常需要验证在传播领域发表的研究结果的稳健性——特别是关于有说服力的情感诉求对社会问题的影响。为此，我们展示了 C. Skurka、J. Niederdeppe、R. Romero-Canyas 和 D. Acup (2018) 的预注册直接复制结果。最初的研究发现，对气候变化的威胁诉求可以增加风险感知和激进主义意图，而幽默诉求也可以增加大量年轻人的激进主义意图。使用相同的刺激、测量和实验设计和类似的样本，我们无法复制这些主要影响。然而，我们确实将年龄复制为幽默对感知风险的影响的调节因子，因此幽默吸引力只会说服新兴成年人（18-21.9 岁）。