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New Psychology Study Unearths Ways to Bolster Global Climate Awareness and Climate Action
“We tested the effectiveness of different messages aimed at addressing climate change and created a tool that can be deployed by both lawmakers and practitioners to generate support for climate policy or to encourage action,” says Madalina Vlasceanu, an assistant professor in New York University’s Department of Psychology and the paper’s lead author. The tool, which the researchers describe as a “Climate Intervention Webapp,” takes into account an array of targeted audiences in the studied countries, ranging from nationality and political ideology to age, gender, education, and income level. “To maximize their impact, policymakers and advocates can assess which messaging is most promising for their publics,” adds paper author Kimberly Doell, a senior scientist at the University of Vienna who led the project with Vlasceanu. Article: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/cr5at Tool: https://climate-interventions.shinyapps.io/climate-interventions/
Frontiers | Emotional responses to climate change information and their effects on policy support
Introduction: As emotions are strong predictors of climate policy support, we examined multiple discrete emotions that people experience in reaction to various types of information about climate change: its causes, the scientific consensus, its impacts, and solutions. Specifically, we assessed the relationships between four types of messages and five discrete emotions (guilt, anger, hope, fear, and sadness), testing whether these emotions mediate the impacts of information on support for climate policy. Methods: An online experiment exposed participants (N = 3,023) to one of four informational messages, assessing participants' emotional reactions to the message and their support for climate change mitigation policies as compared to a no-message control group. Results: Each message, except the consensus message, enhanced the feeling of one or more emotions, and all of the emotions, except guilt, were positively associated with policy support. Two of the messages had positive indirect effects on policy support: the impacts message increased sadness, which in turn increased policy support, and the solutions message increased hope, which increased policy support. However, the solutions message also reduced every emotion except hope, while the impacts, causes, and consensus messages each suppressed hope. Discussion: These findings indicate that climate information influences multiple emotions simultaneously and that the aroused emotions may conflict with one another in terms of fostering support for climate change mitigation policies. To avoid simultaneously arousing a positive motivator while depressing another, message designers should focus on developing content that engages audiences across multiple emotional fronts.
Eco-labels on food encourage people to eat more sustainably - The British Psychological Society
Katie De-loyde at the University of Bristol and colleagues created three mock-ups of menus, of the sort you might see in a food delivery app. Each of these menus featured three burritos — beef, chicken and vegetarian. For each burrito, the price (the same for each), the calorie content, a Fairtrade logo, a spice indicator and a photo of the product were all included. In one mock-up, the team also included a ‘social nudge’ (something designed to encourage people to act according to social norms): the vegetarian burrito sported a gold star with the words ‘Most Popular’. In another version of the menu, each burrito was instead accompanied with an ‘eco-label’, indicating its ranking on a traffic light type scale of sustainability. The beef got a red 5 rating (for unsustainable), the chicken a yellow 3 (neither sustainable nor unsustainable) and the vegetarian a green 1 (sustainable).
Stop Telling Kids They’ll Die From Climate Change | WIRED UK
Words that work: effective language in sustainability communications | Radley Yeldar
The App That Translates Air Pollution Into Cigarettes - CityLab
Why Apocalyptic Claims About Climate Change Are Wrong
Climate change, language and politics: How should we talk about what's happening to the planet? - The Washington Post
In the middle of a winter’s night in 2017, Frank Luntz’s cellphone alerted him to a nearby wildfire. The longtime analyst of public opinion opened his bedroom curtains and saw, less than a mile away, flames chewing the dark sky over Los Angeles. Luntz — who specializes in how the public reacts to words — saw scary evidence of a threat that he once tried to neutralize with language. In 2001, he’d written a memo of environmental talking points for Republican politicians and instructed them to scrub their vocabulary of “global warming,” because it had “catastrophic connotations,” and rely on another term: “climate change,” which suggested “a more controllable and less emotional challenge.” Last month, with a revised script, Luntz appeared before the Senate Democrats’ Special Committee on the Climate Crisis. “I’m here before you to say that I was wrong in 2001,” Luntz said. Nearby was a colorful chart of vocabulary, developed since his polling in 2009 showed bipartisan support for climate legislation. He went on: “I’ve changed. And I will help you with messaging, if you wish to have it.”
Crafting environmental messages to affect social change – Please keep to the path
Messages focused on the economic costs or negative impacts to individuals were more effective than motivational messaging in gaining support from the public and reducing the psychological distance of an environmental issue.
From solar panels to changing your diet — 11 ways you can combat climate change - MarketWatch
Good, very concrete communications with examples of exactly how much of a difference an individual can make to prevent people from feeling overwhelmed and like they can't make a difference on the issue
Understanding how messaging is perceived by the public through a new theoretical model – Please keep to the path
The results lead to some useful messaging recommendations, such as active publics being more effectively moved to action through motivational frames, rather than diagnostic (i.e. problem-focused) or prognostic (i.e. solution-focused) frames.
Please don’t leave the path
A negatively framed message (i.e. which describes the behavior that should not be done) is more effective, at least in this context, than a positive framed message that describes the preferred behavior.