Framing trust: the role of media bias in shaping taxpayer compliance motivation

Tax avoidance and evasion impose substantial fiscal costs on governments worldwide, while growing social media reliance amplifies biased narratives’ capacity to shape public perceptions of government accountability. Despite extensive research on deterrence and behavioural economics, the influence of media bias on committed tax compliance motivation, particularly across gender, remains underexplored. This study examines how positive and negative media bias influences taxpayers’ committed motivation and whether gender moderates these effects. Unlike prior single-theory approaches, this study integrates Psychological Contract Theory (PCT) and Evolutionary Psychology Theory (EPT) within a single experimental framework, enabling simultaneous explanation of universal media effects and gender-contingent variation. In a pretest–posttest control-group experiment, 60 social media users in Indonesia were exposed to positive, negative, or neutral media content on tax fund management, with motivation assessed using t-tests and ANOVA. Negative media bias significantly reduced committed motivation, while positive bias enhanced it. Gender differences emerged exclusively under positive media exposure, with women showing substantially greater motivational gains than men. Tax authorities should therefore invest in positive, accountability-focused communication strategies with gender-tailored approaches to maximise voluntary compliance, consistent with field evidence that communication strategy design meaningfully shapes compliance outcomes. Findings should be interpreted within the study’s scope, as a sample of young urban adults in one Indonesian city limits generalisability.