A study was conducted to examine message evaluations of selected public service advertisements (PSAs) by a young adult population and to test whether local and nonlocal source attribution would influence those evaluations. In addition, the study investigated the extent to which audience characteristics such as fatalism (the degree to which a subject feels that his or her actions will affect a situation) and social responsibility can predict responses to such advertisements. Subjects, 108 college students in two separate classes, viewed seven individual slides containing printed PSAs. One group saw only PSAs having a local response source added to the original text; the second group saw the identical set, but in their original form, in which only two had local response sources. The subjects evaluated the PSAs using a semantic differential scale, then completed fatalism and social responsibility scales. They also supplied demographic information. Results indicated that local response sources did not produce significantly higher message evaluations than nonlocal sources. Social responsibility emerged as the most predictive variable in both treatment situations; fatalism, which emerged as a significant negative predictor of message evaluation, was prominent only in the local source situation. (FL)