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For many policy issues, people holding the majority opinion often do not act in accordance with their beliefs. While underestimating public opinion appears as a likely cause, correcting this misperception often fails to motivate those in the majority to act. Investigating further, we surveyed a nationally representative sample (N  =   1,000) of Republican voters about vaccination. Despite a majority supporting vaccines, Republicans on average underestimated other Republicans' support. However, this misperception occurred primarily among anti-vaccine Republicans—a group that reported a greater willingness to share their vaccine views. We show how an information environment overrepresented with minority views may discourage majority view holders from speaking out even when they are aware of their majority status. That is, instead of experiencing pluralistic ignorance, those in the majority may be discouraged from expressing their views due to anticipated social conflict from engaging in an information environment disproportionately made up of minority views. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a nationally representative sample of Democrats and Republicans (n = 1,000), we conducted an online survey wording experiment to examine the presence of a labeling effect when a vaccine verification system is referred to as either "vaccine passports" or "vaccine verification." Critically, we use both close-ended and open-ended responses in order to understand how the different labels influence the level of support as well as individual thoughts. While our findings show slightly higher public support when a vaccine program is labeled as "vaccine verification" as compared to "vaccine passport," deep partisan divides still exist. Indeed, Republicans show less support for a vaccine program, regardless of the label used. We dig into these partisan differences using the open-ended thought listing exercise we provided to respondents. We discuss the benefits of supplementing open-ended responses as an enhancement to close-ended measures in experimental research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Controversy surrounding an autism-vaccine link has elicited considerable news media attention. Despite being widely discredited, research suggests that journalists report this controversy by presenting claims both for and against a link in a relatively "balanced" fashion. To investigate how this reporting style influences judgments of vaccine risk, we randomly assigned 320 undergraduate participants to read a news article presenting either claims both for/against an autism-vaccine link, link claims only, no-link claims only or non-health-related information. Participants who read the balanced article were less certain that vaccines are safe, more likely to believe experts were less certain that vaccines are safe and less likely to have their future children vaccinated. Results suggest that balancing conflicting views of the autism-vaccine controversy may lead readers to erroneously infer the state of expert knowledge regarding vaccine safety and negatively impact vaccine intentions.

In a recent article, van der Linden, Maibach, and Leiserowitz ([2019]. Exposure to Scientific Consensus Does Not Cause Psychological Reactance. Environmental Communication, 1–8) claim that exposure to a consensus message on climate change does not cause psychological reactance. In doing so, they provide a critique and "replication" of our recently published study which found evidence to the contrary (Ma, Dixon, & Hmielowski, 2019. Psychological Reactance From Reading Basic Facts on Climate Change: The Role of Prior Views and Political Identification. Environmental Communication, 13(1), 71–86). We address key shortcomings of their findings – the most significant of which is their study's lack of an appropriate control group and problematic measure for psychological reactance – while also responding to their specific critiques of our study. When accounting for these shortcomings, their findings resemble ours: climate change skeptics and Republicans strongly believe that a consensus message about climate change is manipulative. We find their emphatic statement that "exposure to scientific consensus does not cause psychological reactance" to be directly challenged by their own findings and impossible to test given their study's design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social network sites have become a primary tool for consuming and sharing news. Typically, sharing a news media article on social media involves two pieces of information: the news media frame and the individual's commentary. With framing as an active, iterative process, we examine the extent to which individuals replicate or reframe when sharing news about climate change to Twitter. First, we conducted a framing analysis of news about climate change. Then, we assessed whether tweets sharing the news media articles in our framing analysis (n  =   9,557) retained or reframed the original frame. Results show 74.64% of the tweets were not a direct replication of the original news media frame. Furthermore, the likelihood that an individual chose to reframe depended on the frame of the original article. Overall, our study illustrates how a constructionist framing approach can be applied to understand the dynamic nature of news sharing on Twitter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]