Prospect theory and intermediate audience: the effects of context on behavioural intention

Prospect theory and intermediate audience: the effects of context on behavioural intention

Wai Man Ko

01/09/2023

Prospect theory predicts how people react to gain or loss-framed outcomes in dilemma situations, where the potential consequence of the choice is framed as a gain (e.g., lives saved) or as a loss (lives lost). This gain-loss framing communication strategy, derived from the theory, has been applied in many contexts, from promoting the use of reusable coffee mugs to vaccination compliance, with loss-framed appeals being found generally to be more persuasive than gain-framed appeals in the context of promoting vaccination. The current study focused on exploring whether these well-established effects persist when an intermediate audience is exposed to gain/loss-framed messaging, using influenza (flu) vaccination intentionality as an outcome. Intermediate audiences refer to those who are evaluating the gains and losses from the message on behalf of someone else (the ultimate audience), while normal audiences are those making decisions on their own behalf. Two hundred participants were recruited for an online, between-subject study, in which participants were split into two audience conditions and within which they were further split to view a gain-framed or a loss-framed message. Their subsequent behavioural intentions were measured as the outcome, with age as a potential moderating factor (and emotional attachment as a potential mediator exclusively for the intermediate audience condition). Results indicate that neither age nor emotional attachment are significant moderators or mediators. Loss-framed appeal enjoyed a persuasive advantage over the gain-framed appeal only in the intermediate audience condition. Possible interpretations of results, along with potential further directions of research, are discussed.

Prospect theory, gain/loss framing, intermediate audience, communication research, health communication, vaccination

To test the outlined hypotheses, our current study took the form of an online Qualtrics questionnaire (see appendix B for questions) where the questionnaire would introduce participants to one of the audience conditions and view the appropriate version of the manipulated message before moving on to answering some items measuring their behavioural intention and emotional attachment. The study has a 2 (intermediate/normal audience condition) X 2 (gain/loss-framed appeal) design with emotional attachment as a potential mediating variable for the intermediate audience condition and behavioural intention as the outcome variable for all audience conditions.
Participants
We recruited 200 healthy adults based in the UK on Prolific, an online research participant recruitment platform. Participants have provided consent and completed the study remotely with their personal devices. Their unique Prolific ID was used in this study as the only identifier, which cannot be traced back to them personally. Participants were compensated monetarily for their participation.
We randomly assigned our participants to one of the four audience conditions with 50 participants each: the normal gain-framed condition, the normal loss-framed condition, the intermediate gain-framed condition, and the intermediate loss-framed condition.
Questionnaire design
Consent
The participant gave consent to participate in the study with the Qualtrics consent element so that participants can check a box for each item. There were seven items that the participants had to check one by one before commencing the study. Responses which failed to provide a full response in the consent item would be removed from the study.
Demographics
For demographics, we have recorded the participants' age and gender for the records. As mentioned, age was also analysed as a moderator as part of our analysis. We have also recorded their Prolific IDs to ensure completion and arrange payment.
Settings of the study
After giving demographic information, participants were introduced to a small piece of information that gave them the context of this study. In normal audience conditions, participants were told that someone had sent them an ad about the flu vaccination, which refers to the manipulated message they will soon view. While for the intermediate audience, on top of the information that is revealed to the normal audience, they were exclusively told that they were a manager in a small town's paper company, which gives them the role of an intermediate audience (manager) who must evaluate the later presented message on behalf of other parties (employees) with themselves irrelevant to the gains and losses.
Material
We have chosen flu vaccination as our topic malady for the manipulation messages as COVID vaccines, as used in recent studies, are perhaps less relevant in what is generally thought of as the post-COVID era. Flu vaccinations, unlike many other vaccines, remain relevant to the major population and most age groups. To allow a closer resemblance to real-world settings and increase the generalisability of the results, we have made unofficial Facebook posts that claim to be from the NHS as the message format. Participants were informed that the graphics were not an actual Facebook post from the NHS but rather a material used solely for this study. See Figure 2 for an example, and appendix A for the complete set of stimuli presented to the participants in the study.
Audience condition. Figure 2 is the gain-framed version of the message from the normal audience condition. In normal audience conditions, the message communicates directly to the participants, stating the potential pros or cons for the participants when the participants decide to vaccinate or not vaccinate. In this condition, it is assumed that the participants evaluated the message on their behalf and nobody else's. While on the contrary, the intermediate audience condition communicates a slightly different message. The "you" in the message is replaced by "your employees". The purpose of this is to highlight that the participants evaluate this message as an intermediate audience (the manager), deciding whether they would recommend the vaccine to somebody else (the ‘ultimate audience’) given the outlined potential gains and losses, while the gains and losses remain irrelevant to the participants personally.
Message framing. The figure is a gain-framed message, and as mentioned, it follows the logical flow of "if you vaccinate, good things will happen". As we can see in Figure 2, if the recipient vaccinates, then according to the text, he/she would have a reduced chance of infection and a reduction in the duration and severity of the symptoms. The lost-framed version of the message follows the logical flow of "if you do not vaccinate, bad things will happen." So, in contrast to figure 2, the lost framed messages would say if the recipient does not vaccinate, he/she would have an increased chance of infection and increase in duration and severity of the symptoms. The two messages communicate the same reality and are logically equivalent. Hence, any differences between the groups can be attributed to the message framing.
Check questions.
After viewing the message, the participants were asked two questions regarding the ads content before moving on to later questions. The check questions were designed to be simple reading comprehension questions that check whether the participants attended to the message in the reading process. We have removed all responses failing to provide a correct answer in either one of the questions.
Behavioural intention
After viewing the framed messages, we have several Likert scale 7-point agree-disagree items used to measure the behavioural intention of the participants. However, given the audience condition differences and hence the potential differences in the decision-making process, behavioural intention for the two types of audience is defined differently. For the intermediate audience condition, behavioural intention is defined as "the intention to recommend/promote behaviour to the ultimate audience (employees)". While for the normal audience conditions, we measure their intention to get the vaccination for themselves. Both audience conditions responded to six items probing their behavioural intentions. In the normal audience condition, participants were asked how likely they would be to get the flu jab, how urgent they thought it is, and whether they would likely plan to get a flu jab after viewing the message. There are also items with reversed wordings asking whether they think getting a flu jab is NOT urgent. The intermediate audience was asked how likely they are to recommend the flu vaccine to their employees and how urgent and necessary they believe the vaccine is to their employees. (See the appendix for the complete set of questions.)
Emotional attachment
As mentioned, there are speculations revolving around the involvement of relational dynamics and relevant emotions in the intermediate audience. Therefore, we have arranged a set of questions probing the participant's emotional attachment towards the employee exclusively for the intermediate audience condition. There were four questions in total in this part of the study, which focused solely on the participants' sense of protection towards the employee, asking to what extent the participants thought that the vaccine was necessary for the employee's own good and well-being, and to what extent were the participants eager to protect them; an item with reversed wordings were also included. (See the appendix for the complete set of questions.)
Method of analysis
We analysed the data using the clm() and clmm() functions from the ordinal package in RStudio using R version 4.1.1. We first confirmed the main effects of message framing and audience conditions using clm(), and then we moved on to analyse the magnitude of random interacting effects of age, question type and individual differences. The reason for choosing cumulative link models (clm) was that the models were designed explicitly for ordinal variables like Likert scales, which predict the probability of each response level, unlike some metric models and prevent type 1 and type 2 errors resulting from forcing ordinal variables onto metric models (Liddell & Kruschke, 2018). As for emotional attachment, given each item was probing quite a different emotion (e.g., sense of responsibility/ sense of protection), we have decided to fit a multivariate ordinal variable using the mvord() function to see if there is a significant difference in the multiple emotional outcomes under different audience condition, after which we investigated if any emotional attachment item was a significant predictor of behavioural intention using another clm model. We have also fitted clm() models including the interaction term between age and conditions predicting behavioural intention to see if age moderates the relationship between message framing and behavioural intention as proposed. Lastly, we have fitted a cumulative link mixed model (clm) to consider the role of potential sources of random effects such as participant differences and question differences in the analyses.

Lancaster University

Data/Excel.csv
Analysis/r_file.R
Text/Word.doc

Ko2023

Eleanor Little, Alicia Turner, Laurie Dixon

Open

None

English

Data

LA1 4YF

Leslie Hallam

MSc

Marketing

185 participants (124 females, 58 males, 2 non-binary, and 1 undisclosed)

Regression