Abstract
Slogans, known for their conciseness and appealing to the audience, have been widely employed by the Chinese government in the health campaigns against coronavirus. This paper investigates the perceived persuasiveness of three widespread slogans in China’s anti-COVID campaign: collectivism-oriented, empathy- arousing, and fear-arousing. The impact of collectivism, empathy, and fear respectively on slogan effectiveness, quality and capability are also examined. The quality of the slogan focused on the feelings of the slogan itself. Effectiveness described the intention of the audiences to change their behaviors after reading the slogan, and capability referred to the extent to which the audiences believed the slogan would change others’ behavior. Twelve anti-COVID slogans were employed as stimuli messages in a 3 (message type: collectivism-oriented, empathy-arousing vs. fear-arousing) x 4 (messages) mixed-design experiment. 384 Participants were recruited through Sojump, a professional online survey provider in China, which consisted of many participants with diverse demographic features. They were randomly assigned to each message type and watched four anti-COVID slogans in a random sequence. Three two-level models were estimated using linear mixed model in SPSS, showing the experimental manipulation was successful. The empathy-arousing condition aroused more empathy than the other two conditions when the fear-arousing condition elicited more fear, and the collectivism-oriented condition elicited more perceived collectivism among participants. Empathy-arousing slogans were perceived to be of the best quality, the most effective, and had the greatest capability to change others. Fear-arousing slogans came last followed by collectivism-oriented slogans.
Presenters
Jiaqi ChengStudent, Translation, Shanghai University of Engineering Science, Zhejiang, China
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2022 Special Focus—At the Crossroads of Paradigms: Considering Heterodoxy in the Social Sciences
KEYWORDS
SLOGANS, Covid-19, COLLECTIVISM, EMPATHY
