The Effect Of Public Service Advertising On Pro-social Behavior

In the context of spiritual civilization construction throughout the country, the amount of public service advertising(PSAs) increases rapidly. Government agencies and non-profit organizations are releasing PSAs to the public through a variety of channels, aiming to improve the public moral sense and then promote the pro-social behavior. However, most of the existing literatures in the field of advertising follow the research paradigm of commercial advertising, but don't have enough explorations of the unique mechanism about public service ads. What's more, There are also some problems in the previous studies, such as the controversy between text and image ads, the simplex research methods. The paper introduces the variables of moral identity and presence to explain PSAs' operation, to explore its mechanism, and to examine the internal relation between advertising presence, audience's moral identity and pro-social behavior.This thesis is mainly organized from four aspects: the phenomenon, the mechanism, the application, and the model validation about PSAs. Study 1 started from a phenomenon about mobile PSAs, using experiments to prove that the current text-based mobile PSAs have no significant effect on the raise of moral identity, while the image-based PSAs with the same theme have an significant effect. Study 2 explored the inherent mechanism of the phenomena in study 1. It adopted the method of comparative experiment to demonstrate that the different effectiveness between text-based and image-based PSAs should be due to the different perceived presence of the advertising rather than the different advertising forms. Study 3 proceeded from the research findings of study 1 and study 2, adopting the method of field survey, using the longitudinal data to testify the positive relationship between moral identity and the actual pro-social behavior. Study 4 used questionnaires to examine the relationship between presence, moral identity, and pro-social behavior. The result shows that moral identity plays a mediating role between the presence and pro-social behavior.Not only does the paper enrich the researches about the effectiveness mechanism of PSAs, but also set up a bridge between advertising and the fields of morality as well as pro-social behavior. Besides, the findings also ha ve a strong practical significance on the PSAs' forms, themes, and publishing channels.