Kerry O’Brien submitted his PhD at the ANU this week. Kerry’s PhD is titled “Framing issues and identities: Aligning the content of group identity with the meaning of issues to produce normative influence.” The project was aimed at integrating the Social Identity model of normative influence with the political science literature on issue framing as a way of influencing political attitudes. Kerry explored several ways of using framing to either make particular identities more salient, or to influence the meaning of those identities. We explored using different frames to influence attitudes to climate change, and also used frames to change the meaning of religious identity when applied to a range of political issues.
