Description:

Please join the American Politics Workshop as they host Sol Hart, Professor of Communications and Media at the University of Michigan.

In response to environmental challenges, advocacy organizations are seeking optimal ways to increase public engagement. In this talk, Prof. Hart will discuss how different message strategies may amplify or attenuate public engagement. Prof. Hart will first present findings from recent studies investigating how positive and negative sentiments in advocacy messages, delivered via email and Facebook, relate to public engagement. The studies reveal that for low-effort engagement, both positive and negative sentiments are positively associated with engagement. However, for high-effort engagement, negative sentiment increases engagement, whereas positive sentiment decreases it. Prof. Hart will also share results from an experiment examining how news articles discussing climate change's unequal impacts, based on race versus class, affect beliefs and support for action. Overall, White participants and those with high levels of symbolic racism had lower levels of belief and support when exposed to the race-focused condition. The results suggest that highlighting class-based climate disparities may be less prone to causing backfire effects.

Sol Hart is a Professor in both Communication and Media and the Program in the Environment at the University of Michigan. He specializes in strategic communication related to environmental, science, and risk issues. Professor Hart’s research includes understanding the role of the media in motivating and engaging the public and how to create effective messages that can cross ideological divides. Professor Hart’s research is supported by the National Science Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. His research has been published in a number of peer reviewed journals, including Nature: Climate Change, Journal of Communication, Communication Research, Communication Yearbook, Science Communication, Public Understanding of Science, Medical Decision Making, Society and Natural Resources, and Environmental Communication.

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