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The recent Covid-19 pandemic lead to a needed trust in politics and science like never before: Since the evaluation of governmental communication highly depends on trust in authorities like the government (Khosravi, 2020), media (Haslett, 2020), science (Siegrist & Zingg, 2014) and accuracy and timeliness of actions (Vink et al., 2019), perceived governmental communication is a highly complex phenomenon that in the face of a global pandemic is especially important. As government communication strategies are in need of adequately balancing public health with individual rights (Vardavas et al., 2021), the public perception thereof is of crucial importance to ensure acceptance and adherence to those measures, in the best possible case diminishing fatality rates in the respective country (Oksanen et al., 2020). That determinants such as socioeconomic status, gender, or age are predicting protective health behavior (Bish & Michie, 2010) already has been researched, similarly to cognitive components like people's risk perception (Conner & Norman, 2015), and trust in politics and science (Dohle, Wingen & Schreiber, 2020). The latter is especially important, since these measures usually include governmental restrictions (Siegrist & Zingg, 2014) and therefore require confidence in institutions and the government: in the COVID-19 pandemic, countries with higher institutionalized trust report lower fatalities (Oksanen et al., 2020). Similarly, trusting science and experts who largely shape the public debate about medical necessities due to a global pandemic is essential for understanding such a complex situation (Hendriks, Kienhues, & Bromme, 2016; Kupferschmidt, 2020). What happens if the health measures communicated by the government is perceived as threat, and generates reactance instead of trust? Seeing that not trusting authorities in the face of a global pandemic can actually have fatal outcomes (Oksanen et al., 2020), it has not been researched yet, which factors on the communication dimension lead to reactant behavior and an aversion to accept the health measures. Since these issues also contain ethically questionable factors such as asking about the perceived threat and fear of individuals, the ethical components of conducting sensible research will be followed carefully. A two wave panel study was conducted already to shed light on the emerging research gaps elaborated above.

Ever since the #MeToo movement sparked a global debate about women’s daily struggles with sexual harassment, the number of news media reports about such incidents has increased. Simultaneously, the effects of such news media articles on victim blaming have been researched, taking into account aspects like attributing positive or negative motives to the victims and perceived reasons to make these accusations public. Yet, the effects of misogynistic advertisements in the context of newspaper articles on the attribution of blame in cases of sexual harassment have not been analyzed so far: Thus, the hereby proposed study aims to shed light on how a misogynistic advertisement in the context an article reporting about a case of sexual harassment as well as the placement of said ad might affect Victim Blaming and influence Brand Attitude. Sexism and Rape Myth Acceptance are expected to moderate these effects, whereas the Attribution of Positive/Negative Motives Towards the Victim and Emotional Response to the Article serve as mediators. A Pre-test (N=167) as well as a more thorough Pilot-study (N=approx. 200) have been conducted already in order test the stimuli as well as the used scales and estimate preliminary expectations. The results could both spark a discussion about how deeply sexism and victim blaming tendencies are rooted in today’s society and how the media could ensure victims are treated more fairly.