Assessing the cognitive autonomy of audiences towards environmental media messages

Environmental issues are the subject of an increasing appropriation by the public, primarily through media messages. In this context, the citizens’ ability to adopt a critical stance towards these messages has become crucial. We study the factors that affect the citizens’ critical judgment towards forest-related media. The research presented in this paper seeks to assess the individuals’ degree of cognitive autonomy towards forest-related media, and how it is influenced by their prior experience of forests. In this paper, we present a preliminary experiment requiring participants to read and react to three posters from different forest stakeholders. Fifty-two students (aged 16 to 20) from two schools (one rural and the other urban) participated in this study. Results show that subjects had a limited cognitive autonomy towards the media that were submitted to them, and that their degree of cognitive autonomy was not affected by their level of forest experience