Health-Framed Messaging and Its Impact on Attitudes Toward Daylight Saving Time

This study aimed to examine public attitudes toward daylight saving time (DST) and its perceived health consequences in Australia, where state-level variation in DST adoption provides a unique setting to test whether the exposure to DST-related health risk information influences these attitudes and how individual differences moderate this effect.

In a preregistered, randomized online experiment, Australian adults (n = 499) were assigned to receive either neutral information about DST or DST-related health-risk messaging highlighting its negative health consequences. Participants' attitudes toward DST, policy preferences, perceived health consequences, pre-existing health awareness, and credibility perceptions were assessed, and sociodemographic characteristics were subsequently collected. Chronotype was assessed using the Micro-Munich ChronoType Questionnaire.

Exposure to DST-related health-risk messaging reduced DST policy support and increased its perceived health consequences, effectively eliminating the modest majority in favour of DST in the absence of such messaging. These effects were stronger among individuals with higher pre-existing health awareness and earlier chronotypes. Mediation analyses showed that shifts in overall attitudes toward DST policy were explained by heightened recognition of DST-related health consequences, with this indirect pathway being amplified when the information was perceived as more credible.

Collectively, our findings show that favourable views of DST are linked to lower recognition of its health consequences, while credible health-risk messaging reduces support by raising awareness of these risks. This underscores the importance of evidence-based health-risk messaging for informing DST policymaking in Australia and internationally, where DST remains a matter of debate.