Unfaking” Climate Change CSR Communication: Positive Attribute Framing as a Tactic Against Negative Company Evaluations

The study experimentally examined the influence of assigning the label of fake news to climate change CSR communication on its credibility, company evaluations and purchase intentions. It was hypothesized that climate change is a polarizing issue that is typically contested by right-wing ideology supporters. We predicted that climate change sceptics would favour negatively framed CSR communication consistently with their motivational and epistemic needs. We found a strong but opposite effect of framing. While participants high in belief for climate change did not discriminate between negative and positive framing, people low in beliefs for climate change preferred positive framing more and made their company evaluations consistently with that preference. This project adds to the literature on CSR framing and extends the knowledge related to countering the fake news effects by identifying the impact of alternative epistemologies created by scientific evidence-refuting stakeholders on their perception of climate change-related communication.