Is being funny a useful policy? How local governments' humorous crisis response strategies and crisis responsibilities influence trust, emotions, and behavioral intentions: Online Supplement
Creators: name: Hämke, Janna
name: Röseler, Stefan
name: Thielsch, Meinald T.
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2022
Subjects: crisis communication
situational crisis communication theory
humor
crisis responsibility
affect
social media

description: This is the online supplement for a study by the University of Muenster, Germany, in cooperation with the State Fire Service Institute NRW, Germany. When choosing how to communicate during a crisis, local governments should consider their target group and the degree to which they are responsible for the crisis, as their communication approach and their crisis responsibility may affect how the public responds. This study is the first to investigate how a local government’s humorously framed response strategy to a low-severity crisis influences people’s trust in the local government and their crisis-related behavioral intentions, specifically when considering the government’s responsibility for the crisis. Based on Situational Crisis Communication Theory (Coombs, 2007), we examine the mediating role of experienced positive or negative affect on people’s responses to a local government’s crisis communication strategy. Further, we exploratorily examine the predictive power and moderating role of demographics, sense of humor, disposition to trust and the respective scenarios. A total of 517 people participated in an online experiment in which they were confronted with three randomly presented fictive crisis scenarios where the local government’s crisis responsibility (high vs. low) as well as the framing of their crisis response strategy (humorous vs. rational) were systematically varied between subjects. First, the results mostly corroborate earlier findings about the degree of crisis responsibility, in that when a government’s crisis responsibility is high, people have less trust and behavioral intentions, and about the mediating role of experienced affect. Second, we found that humorously framed strategies negatively influence trust and positive affect (but not behavioral intentions). In contrast to earlier findings, the crisis responsibility × framing interaction was not significant. Altogether, results advise against using humor in crisis communications in the public sector. We derive theoretical and practical recommendations for future research and crisis managers. The study was approved by the ethics committee of the Faculty of Psychology &amp; Sports Science of the University of Münster (ID 2021-41-MT) and pre-registered on AsPredicted (https://aspredicted.org/f8yy5.pdf). This online supplement includes Appendices A-E with results of two pre-studies and additional information on sample characteristics, materials, scales, and statistical analyses, datasets of pre-studies and the main study (Note: The raw data contains only the information of persons who were included in the analysis and have agreed to it.), the R script, and the codebook of variables. This research is part of the project "FIRE: Feedback Instruments for Rescue Force Education - Leadership and Teamwork in High Risk Environments", supported with funds from the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.