Dr. Jingwen Zhang and Ph.D. candidate Haoning Xue received the National Science Foundation (NSF) Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grants in Decision, Risk and Management Sciences to support Haoning's dissertation titled "Communicating risks in a sensational media environment - Using short video multimodal features to attract attention and reduce psychological reactance for persuasion."

Below is the project abstract:

In today's social media landscape, dominated by short videos, competition for public attention affects information integrity in science communication. Organizations and individuals use various multimodal features such as images, background music, and visual effects to maximize message viewing in hopes of shifting public opinion toward important issues. Message sensation value (MSV) captures how content and format features of messages can influence audience engagement, directly or indirectly changing public opinion towards the issues. Previous studies present conflicting views on MSV's impacts on persuasion. This research captures and tests MSV's impacts using a novel short video dataset, aiming to enable science and health communicators, policymakers, and technological platforms to better understand and address the effects of sensational social media features in influencing how people consume and are influenced by these messages.

This research employs a combination of large-scale computational video analysis and an online experiment. First, the project uses computational techniques to systematically identify multi-modal features in 10,000 videos of varying message content quality and examines the associations of 18 multi-modal features to video engagement metrics. This research provides evidence on the role played by multi-modal features in the propagation of messages. Second, this research conducts an online experiment (N = 1,500) with a 2 (MSV: high, low) by 2 (belief congruence: pro-attitudinal, counter-attitudinal) by 2 (issues) between-subject design, plus a control condition. The experiment tests competing theoretical mechanisms of MSV's persuasive effects on attention, credibility judgment, psychological reactance, and risk perceptions for individuals with varying pre-existing attitudes on the two critical issues. This research provides a theory-informed investigation of sensational media features used in science and risk communication. The findings shed light on effective strategies for communicating health and climate risks and scientific information and maintaining information integrity.