THE ROLE OF EMOTIONAL APPEALS IN RISK COMMUNICATION Encouraging natural hazard preparedness with emotional-arousing messages

Abstract

Climate change increases the likelihood and intensity of natural hazards. People must be aware and ready for natural risks in their living area and learn how to protect themselves against them. However, people are usually not prepared to face natural hazards. Being unprepared can have dramatic consequences, sometimes being a matter of life and death. Hence, governments must communicate natural hazard preparedness and encourage their population to prepare. However, an important question remains: how can communication effectively influence preparedness behaviors? This study explores the role of emotional appeals in risk communication regarding natural hazard preparedness. The thesis particularly focuses on the use of hope appeals. Indeed, most academic research has investigated fear appeal messages. If the latter are considered motivators for encouraging behaviors, hope appeals are also promising for motivating natural hazard preparedness. It is even more interesting to explore hope appeals when questioning if the government can send messages that induce fear in their population. Indeed, citizens may not accept a message that is framed negatively. By means of an experimental survey, the study aims to explore whether hope appeals have comparable effects as fear appeals for encouraging natural hazard preparedness behaviors and whether both emotional appeals predict higher intentions to prepare compared to a neutral message. The results for both fear and hope appeals were inconclusive, meaning that the treatments did not increase preparedness intentions compared to the neutral message. However, the fear appeal was less accepted by the respondents than the other messages.