Grassroots Autonomy: A Laypersons' Perspective on Autonomy.

In the age of artificial intelligence, the common interest in human autonomy is experiencing a revival. Autonomy has formerly and mostly been investigated from a theoretical scientific perspective, in which scholars from various disciplines have linked autonomy with the concepts of dignity, independence from others, morality, self-awareness, and unconventionality. In a series of three semi-qualitative, preregistered online studies (total = 505), we investigated laypersons' understanding of autonomy with a bottom-up procedure to find out how far lay intuition is consistent with scientific theory.

Effects of Message Framing, Sender Authority, and Recipients' Self-Reported Trait Autonomy on Endorsement of Health and Safety Measures during the Early COVID-19 Pandemic.

In the COVID-19 pandemic, human solidarity plays a crucial role in meeting this maybe greatest modern societal challenge. Public health communication targets enhancing collective compliance with protective health and safety regulations. Here, we asked whether authoritarian/controlling message framing as compared to a neutral message framing may be more effective than moralizing/prosocial message framing and whether recipients' self-rated trait autonomy might lessen these effects.