Perceptions of Manipulation and Judgments of Illegitimacy: Pitfalls in the Use of Emphasis Framing when Communicating about CO2 Capture and Storage

The mitigation of climate change requires reductions in the amount of CO₂ emitted into the atmosphere. One way to achieve this in the short run is through the implementation of CO₂ capture and storage (CCS) technology. The viability of CCS not only depends on technical and regulatory issues, but also on public attitudes. Communication plays an important role in shaping these attitudes. This paper reports on two experiments performed to examine effects of emphasis framing in CCS communications, meaning that greater weight is given to advantages of CCS over disadvantages or vice versa. Although emphasis framing can be effective in shaping attitudes, our findings suggest that there may be long-term costs to using this communication technique as it can be perceived as manipulative. Moreover, emphasis framing is judged as relatively illegitimate when the source is expected to be impartial rather than biased.