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Introduction
Dr. Shannon Cruz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Arts & Sciences at Pennsylvania State University with a co-appointment in the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences. Her research focuses on social influence and environmental and risk communication, with an emphasis on quantitative methodologies.
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Publications
Publications (26)
There are long traditions of research on the implications of cognitive structure for education and persuasion, respectively. Even though both are vital for understanding pro-environmental attitude and behavior change, however, these literatures have rarely been brought into conversation. As a preliminary step in this direction, the present study ex...
The superdiffuser model predicts that the diffusion of a new behavior can be accelerated if superdiffusers (people who are connectors, persuaders, and mavens) are recruited to promote the behavior. We propose an expanded model where the importance of these traits varies by network structure and other network member characteristics. We assessed the...
Developing effective messages to promote climate action requires an understanding of how these messages are processed by different groups. Though the influence of partisan identity on this processing is well established, much less is known about the role of preexisting climate beliefs. Furthermore, scholars have recently raised the possibility that...
An important component of theoretical and applied work on social influence is identifying influential people. Boster et al.’s theoretical framework on superdiffusers provides one method of doing so, but important questions on the nature of influence remain. In particular, because existing studies have primarily sampled U.S. college students, it rem...
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a source of conflict between liberals and conservatives in the U.S., with many politicized debates focusing on college students and universities. To understand this partisan conflict and how it might be mitigated, one useful approach is to examine how collective sensemaking about the virus and virus response, as refle...
In the face of sharp declines in populations of many bee species, several activists have embraced social media to advocate for their conservation. The efficacy of these efforts in promoting offline behaviors, however, remains unclear. We explored this issue through two studies. First, we examined the content of social media activism by analyzing tw...
Previous research suggests that impression management goals and face threats can be barriers to seeking support, especially among college students and those facing severe problems that are highly stigmatized. In such cases, technologically-mediated communication channels (TMCCs) may be an important resource because they have unique affordances that...
Background:
Intake of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) is associated with many negative health outcomes. Efforts to curb consumption generally take one of two approaches: (a) Individual change based on the communication of personal risk information or (b) policies that limit or disincentivize the behavior, such as restricting access or implementin...
Global declines in populations of several bee species have highlighted the importance of efforts to conserve bees and other pollinators. Because research on the social dimensions of pollinator conservation is limited, however, developing clear strategies to promote conservation behaviors remains a challenge. In an effort to contribute to understand...
As warnings about the seriousness of climate change become increasingly dire, there is growing concern about its psychological outcomes, particularly climate anxiety. There is not yet consensus on how to conceptualize and measure climate anxiety, but Clayton and Karazsia (2020) recently proposed a climate change anxiety scale as a possible solution...
Message fatigue is the aversive motivational state that results from excessive exposure to campaign messages or similar information over an extended period of time. When fatigued, individuals become less attentive, less responsive, and more resistant to campaign messages and related information. Thus, understanding the bases and functioning of fati...
Environmental nonprofits (ENPOs) play vital roles in addressing environmental problems. To succeed, ENPOs must be adept at developing and maintaining successful partnerships with businesses, government agencies, and other NPOs. Even though evidence suggests ENPOs rely on these partnerships more than NPOs in other cause areas, however, relatively fe...
Efforts by universities to reduce the spread of COVID-19 include health campaigns intended to encourage students to wear masks. While well-intended, these efforts may produce counter-persuasion (e.g., decrease masking) if they are seen as threatening individuals’ freedom to choose. In a rolling cross-sectional study of one university campaign (n =...
Building support for fighting climate change via public policy requires overcoming motivated resistance based on political identities. One solution is for sources, congenial to the audience's political orientation, to advocate such policies. This study explores explanations suggested by the self-concept model of cognitive dissonance and the extent...
Growing concern about the seriousness of issues such as climate change has made the value of research on social and behavioral aspects of environmental problems clearer than ever. For authors studying environmental concern or attitudes, however, survey development can be a daunting task. A large number of scales measuring environmental concern have...
Community engagement is a vital aspect of addressing environmental contamination and remediation. In the United States, the Superfund Research Program (SRP) forms groups of academic researchers from the social and physical sciences into Community Engagement Cores (CECs) and Research Translation Cores (RTCs), which focus on various aspects of inform...
Loss of property value is a major concern in communities faced with the toxic byproducts of industrial practices. Even after site remediation, stigma may persist and negatively affect market values of residential properties. To study the effects of contamination and of remediation on property values in Midland, Michigan, where dioxins have been rel...
The articles in this special issue on New Directions in Environmental Communication in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health present new research and perspectives on engaging communities impacted by Superfund sites—the hazardous waste sites that have been identified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) a...
As it becomes increasingly urgent to address climate change, scholars have begun to explore how attitudes toward climate change are shaped, including the influence of messages people hear in the context of the ongoing climate change debate. What has not yet been addressed, however, is how these arguments might be affecting not only climate change a...
Executive Summary This study assesses the state of the evidence about Project ECHO (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes) and suggests directions for improving its performance in the field. As sometimes happens in the diffusion of a promising intervention, the state of the art-what practitioners are doing in the field-can outrun the state of...
Trust is generally recognized as important for risk-relevant behavior but research suggests that trust in different organizations may have varying effects. This research advances the literature by testing two hypotheses which postulate that this variability can be explained by risk perception. We collected data from 351 anglers regarding their trus...
This study reports the results of two meta-analyses investigating the relationships between environmental concern and both political party affiliation and political ideology. Political party affiliation was found to have a substantial association with environmental concern (ρ = 0.22), as was political ideology (ρ = 0.27). Both relationships could a...
This article examined the extent to which residents living in the Midland–Saginaw–Bay City area in Eastern Michigan felt stigmatized due to industrial contamination. Seventy in-depth interviews were conducted with local residents, focusing on the extent to which they experienced three aspects of stigma—affective, cognitive, and behavioral. Results...
Meta-analytic procedures were used to estimate the effect of experienced guilt on compliance. Examination of 47 effect sizes indicated that inducing guilt is an effective means by which to increase compliance, ρ = .26. Moreover, despite coding for numerous substantive and methodological moderators, there was no evidence of moderation in these data....
Plagiarism is a prevalent form of academic dishonesty in the undergraduate instructional context. Although students engage in plagiarism with some frequency, instructors often do little to help students understand the significance of plagiarism or to create assignments that reduce its likelihood. This study reports survey, coding, and TurnItIn soft...
Many normative beliefs are shared and learned through interpersonal communication, yet research on norms typically focuses on their effects rather than the communication that shapes them. This study focused on interpersonal communication during pregnancy to uncover (a) the nature of pregnancy-related communication and (b) normative information tran...
