The Role of Initial Affective Impressions in Responses to Educational Communications: The Case of Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS)

Emerging technologies promise potential benefits at a potential cost. Developers of educational communications aim to improve people's understanding and to facilitate public debate. However, even relatively uninformed recipients may have initial feelings that are difficult to change. We report that people's initial affective impressions about carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), a low-carbon coal-based electricity-generation technology with which most people are unfamiliar, influences how they interpret previously validated education materials. As a result, even individuals who had originally self-identified as uninformed persisted in their initial feelings after reading the educational communication-though perseverance of feelings about CCS was stronger among recipients who had originally self-identified as relatively informed (Study 1). Moreover, uninformed recipients whose initial feelings were experimentally manipulated by relatively uninformative pro-CCS or anti-CCS arguments persisted in their manipulated feelings after reading the educational communication, due to evaluating the educational communication in line with their manipulated impressions (Study 2). Hence, our results suggest that educational communications will have more impact if they are disseminated before people form strong feelings about the topic under consideration, especially if these are based on little to no factual understanding.