Influence of textual hedging and framing variations on decision making choices pertaining to the climate change issue

Better methods of communication that enhance, not hinder, the efficient and equitable transfer of information from expert sources to decision makers and the general citizenry are being sought by those who must make decisions regarding complex environmental issues such as climate change.; The effects of variations in two textual components, hedging and framing, on subjects' choices during an environmental decision making situation were investigated. Subjects were provided with information in a text passage that conveyed both the benefits and detriments associated with a decision to either support or not support large-scale climate change reductions in the U.S. Measures of subjects' attitudes, beliefs and decision intentions were derived from the Theory of Reasoned Action. Other measures, derived from risk communication studies, included trust in the credibility of information, clarity of information, and prioritization of information use during decision making.; Subjects who participated were undergraduate students enrolled at The Ohio State University. The 160 participants were randomly assigned one of either 16 treatments or a control. Subjects received the same factual information regarding the climate change issue. However, each experimental treatment represented a different combination of textual manipulations, with information either hedged or not hedged and presented in either a positive or negative frame.; Variations of hedging did not result in any significant findings, though a key trend was observed. This trend suggests that a subject's trust in the credibility of information presented may decrease when the benefits of not supporting climate change reductions are not hedged. Variations in how climate change information was framed, however, yielded some highly significant differences (p ≤ 0.001). The results suggest that negative framing of either side of an issue, when the other is framed positively, influences the priority a subject places on the importance of information, favoring the negatively framed component.; This evidence suggests that if the goal of communicating information during an environmental decision making situation, such as climate change, is to balance the presentation of information and optimize cognitive and affective processing, then hedging all statements and using negative framing for both sides of an issue is prudent.