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Understanding the Effects of Message Complexity and Epistemic Uncertainty on Attitudinal, Cognitive, and Behavioral Responses to Messages About Microplastics
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How you word health messages about microplastics matters, especially for how comfortable people are with uncertainty. People who dislike uncertainty felt more overwhelmed by hedge-filled messages, but only when the message was also complex, and that overwhelm made them less likely to act. Simpler, clearer messaging may help more people actually respond to microplastics research.
This study examined how message complexity and epistemic uncertainty affect attitudes toward science, information overload, and behavioral intention using a 2 × 2 factorial design. Although no main effects were detected, the interaction between complexity and uncertainty on information overload depended on intolerance of uncertainty (IU): uncertainty reduced information overload for low-IU individuals but increased it for high-IU individuals. Moreover, the conditional indirect effect of uncertainty on behavioral intention through information overload was significant under high message complexity at specific levels of IU. When message complexity was low, this indirect effect was not significant at any level of IU.
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