An Experimental Study of Climate Change Messages: Who and How Many to Feature?

ABSTRACT

There is some evidence to suggest an absence of emotional activation about climate change, partly due to the perception of it as a distant phenomenon. Little research to date has also examined whether individual portrayals are best within the context of psychological distance. There is also a lack of studies that experimentally evaluate human and animal messaging using a causal research design. We examine human and animal effects and individual and group effects on a set of psychological and behavioral variables: psychological distance, positive emotions, negative emotions, pro-environmental intent, and donation behavior. We explore these variables across two separate experiments that manipulate the content of a hypothetical news article describing climate change impacts: one featuring drought in Ethiopia and the other featuring wildfires in Arizona. Findings suggest that the psychological distance subdimensions of geographic, hypotheticality, and temporal distance matter for climate change messages and that messages that emphasize impacts on animals may actually diminish distance on these subdimensions relative to messages that feature humans.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change appeals
• environmental communication
• experimental design
• donation behavior

Acknowledgments

We thank Jeremey Bailenson, Lisa Dilling, Erin Espelie, Jason Gnerre, Martha Freeman, and Kelly Hallisy for their feedback, which enabled us to improve this piece. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their help in refining this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a study of how climate skeptics react to messages, please see Franzen and Mader (2020).

2 RQs and hypotheses have been reshaped from this study’s OSF post. We test the same hypotheses listed on OSF but have reframed some RQs to avoid redundancy in the analysis. A mediation analysis was ran using the Hayes and Preacher (2014) statistical mediation analysis technique during an earlier iteration. Please see supplementary analysis.