Cultural resonance becomes evident in political and media communication in situations where messages fail to resonate with audiences due to their lack of cultural congruence. As Romania faced widespread Covid-19 vaccination scepticism, the president appealed to church officials for their support, but they refused. The president’s attempt to create a culturally resonant message for Romanian citizens to vaccinate remained unmet. While the concept of cultural resonance is supposed to explain why audiences adopt certain frames more easily, we lack a systematic understanding of what constitutes cultural resonance, as well as how we can measure its effects in public discourse. This study furthers our understanding of resonance processes in political communication and contributes to framing effects research. To our knowledge, it constitutes the first attempt to study the causal relationship between exposure to culturally congruent frames and resonance outcomes. Furthermore, we investigate whether culturally congruent frames are resonant only when heuristic processing occurs (compared to systematic) and whether having counterarguments present cancels their effect. Lastly, we develop survey measures for resonance outcomes (i.e., issue interpretations that range from unchallenged acceptance of arguments to outright rejection). We conduct an online survey experiment (N=2700) in three national contexts: Romania, Germany, and the UK. The countries were chosen to vary significantly on the individualism vs collectivism national cultural dimension. The more individualist the context, the more should the guilt eliciting policy resonate (UK=89/100). Conversely, the more collectivist the context, the more should the shame policy resonate (Romania=30/100). Germany leans towards individualism (67/100).