Impact of public information campaign on citizen behaviors: Vignette experimental study on recycling program in South Korea

Abstract

This study uses a vignette-based survey experiment for recycling programs in Korea to examine how different messages of a public information campaign as a policy instrument affect the attitudes and behaviors of citizens. It tests hypotheses based on construal-level theory, which suggests that people tend to be more affected by abstract messages under distant psychological conditions and by concrete messages under proximal psychological conditions. In contrast to the conventional assumption of construal-level theory, this study shows that people appear to be more affected by concrete and specific messages (mundane instructions for “how and what to recycle”) than by abstract messages (a noble vision and goal for “why to recycle”) under both distant and proximal conditions.