Stories of intentional action mobilise climate policy support and action intentions

Abstract

What makes a climate story effective? We examined if short fiction stories about everyday pro-environmental behaviours motivate climate policy support, and individual and collective climate action in a nationally representative experiment (N = 903 UK adults). The story featuring protagonists driven by pro-environmental intentions (i.e., the intentional environmentalist narrative) increased participants’ support for pro-climate policies and intentions to take both individual and collective pro-environmental actions, more so than did stories featuring protagonists whose pro-environmental behaviours were driven by intentions to gain social status, to protect their health, and a control story. Participants’ stronger feelings of identification with the protagonist partially explained these effects of the intentional environmentalist narrative. Results highlight that narrating intentional, rather than unintentional, pro-environmental action can enhance readers’ climate policy support and intentions to perform pro-environmental action. Therefore, the intentions driving pro-environmental action may have implications for the extent to which observes identify with the actor and take pro-environmental action themselves.

Non-monetary narratives motivate businesses to engage with climate change

“…Third, our research demonstrates the usefulness of articulating the challenges and successes of real people in advancing sustainability (De Meyer et al 2021 ). Past research has proposed fictional stories to inspire climate actions (Sabherwal and Shreedhar 2022 ; Smalley et al 2022 ). We advance this line of inquiry by demonstrating the practicality and effectiveness of employing real-world protagonists to communicate about climate actions.…”

“…41–51), facilitating causal reasoning on the part of readers and helping answer “why” questions when it comes to events in the world (Dahlstrom 2010 ; Graesser et al 2021 ). Narrative communication has been demonstrated as a powerful form of persuasion for attaining desirable outcomes across different domains due to its focus on personalized accounts of events (Green 2006 ; Dahlstrom 2014 ; Sabherwal and Shreedhar 2022 ). Central to narratives is the explicit focus on protagonists to encode actions and motivations (Dahlstrom 2010 ; Markowitz and Guckian 2018 ), garnering interest from audiences and enabling them to develop strong affective attachments to the story (Green and Brock 2000 ; Morris et al 2019 ).…”

Cli-fi videos can increase charitable donations: experimental evidence from the United Kingdom

“…To alleviate the negative eco-emotions, there have been calls to instead tell stories of present-day heroes taking action now (Ghosh, 2017;Holleman, 2019). In an experimental study, Sabherwal and Shreedhar (2022) found that reading a short cli-fi story about a protagonist taking intentional environmental action in the present is more persuasive at changing individual and collective climate action intentions, but that it did not increase charitable donations (n = 903, United Kingdom). Thus, current evidence shows that reading cli-fi stories can increase attitudes and intentions, but not necessarily behavior.…”

“…Although mixed, existing literature suggests that textual cli-fi stories could potentially raise support for pro-climate change attitudes and intentions both compared to a control story but also factual text. While there is some promising evidence that reading cli-fi can also increase pro-environmental behaviors like recycling and donations (Morris et al, 2019), there is also evidence finding no effects on intentions, donations and policy support (Cooper and Nisbet, 2016;Wong-Parodi and Feygina, 2021;Sabherwal and Shreedhar, 2022). These studies largely examine the effect of textual cli-fi-narratives and scientific information, but do not systematically explore the effect of the medium of communicating cli-fi itself.…”

Cultural shift for pro-environmental behavioural change: Developing and measuring the Environmental Culture in Organisations (ECO) Framework

“…Finally, to customise ECO to the unique context of climate change, we refer to the literature on pro-environmental behaviour. Research in this domain outlines the organisational and motivational features that drive actions related to sustainability: these include policies, infrastructure, social norms (Fritsche et al, 2018;Lülfs & Hahn, 2014;Papagiannakis & Lioukas, 2012), intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and personal values (Sabherwal & Shreedhar, 2022;Stern et al, 1999). Moreover, research finds that institutional practices can have positive spill-over effects on individual perceptions and actions-for example organisational policies can shape pro-environmental intentions and behaviour at home (Shreedhar et al, 2022;Verfuerth et al, 2021;Wang et al, 2022;Wu & Paluck, 2020).…”