Visualizing climate change: the role of construal level, emotional valence, and visual literacy

Duan, Ran; Bombara, Christian

doi:10.1007/s10584-021-03291-x

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 85 publications

(53 reference statements)

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“…In addition, biological content knowledge would also be associated with a more developed visual literacy regarding scientific communication, which could have important consequences for how the images are processed. Duan and Bombara (2022) found that visual literacy moderates the effect of climate change images that differ in the level of abstraction. For less visually literate participants, abstract images were associated with perceiving a longer psychological distance, and vice versa, while this effect was absent for more visually literate participants.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Visual images of the biological microcosmos: Viewers’ perception of realism, preference, and desire to explore

2022

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Visual images are crucial for communicating science in educational contexts and amongst practitioners. Reading images contributes to meaning-making in society at large, and images are fundamental communicative tools in public spaces such as science centers. Here, visitors are exposed to a range of static, dynamic, and digital visual representations accessible through various multimodal and interactive possibilities. Images conveying scientific phenomena differ to what extent they represent real objects, and include photographs, schematic illustrations, and measurement-based models. Depicting realism in biological objects, structures and processes through images differs with respect to, inter alia, shading, color, and surface texture. Although research has shown that aspects of these properties can both potentially benefit and impair interpretation, little is known about their impact on viewers’ visual preference and inclination for further exploration. Therefore the aim of this study is to investigate what effect visual properties have on visitors’ perception of biological images integrated in an interactive science center exhibit. Visitors responded to a questionnaire designed to assess the impact of three indicators of realism (shading, color, and surface texture) and biological content (e.g., cells and viruses) on participants’ preferences, perceptions of whether biological images depicted real objects, and their desire to further explore images. Inspired by discrete choice experiments, image pairs were systematically varied to allow participants to make direct choices between images with different properties. Binary logistic regression analysis revealed that the three indicators of realism were all significant predictors of participants’ assessments that images depict real objects. Shadows emerged as a significant predictor of preference for further exploration together with the presence of cells in the image. Correlation analysis indicated that images that were more often selected as depicting real objects were also more often selected for further exploration. We interpret the results in terms of construal level theory in that a biological image perceived as a realistic portrayal would induce a desire for further exploration. The findings have implications for considering the role of realism and preference in the design of images for communicating science in public spaces.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Visual images of the biological microcosmos: Viewers’ perception of realism, preference, and desire to explore

2022

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“…As Lidström et al (2015, p. 24) point out, such narratives may increase awareness about an issue and simultaneously close down “other potentially legitimate, emancipatory and equally feasible ways of framing and understanding a particular phenomenon.” In this case, the usefulness of such narratives resides in sidestepping difficulties in telling stories about climate change while mitigating such change. Climate change “represents a greater communications challenge as it is temporally and spatially remote from the individual” (O’Neill et al, 2009, p. 360); it is perceived by the public as “abstract and psychologically distant” (Duan et al, 2022, p. 2). Stop Adani campaigners we interviewed said their exchanges with members of the public highlighted a lack of knowledge on the causes of climate change.…”

Section: The Carmichael Coal Mine and The Stop Adani Movementmentioning

confidence: 99%

The finch in the coal mine: Interrogating the environmental politics of extinction narratives

Hine

Mayes

Hurst

2022

Geographical Research

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The black-throated finch is an endangered species whose highest quality remaining habitat directly overlaps with the site of the controversial Adani Carmichael coal mine in Central Queensland, Australia. The image of this finch has been widely used by anti-Adani protest groups as a powerful symbol for the destructive nature of greenfield coal mining. Drawing on extinction studies literature, we problematise the use of the black-throated finch as a symbol of imminent extinction, highlighting how activists have constructed a fixed finch on-the-brink ontology that narrows possible futures for the species. We identify how the finch has been strategically deployed as an affective tool for engaging publics while the anti-Adani campaign has been primarily driven by concerns around climate change futures. We use primary sources of anti-Adani ephemera as well as interviews with key scientists, activists, and image-makers involved in the debate about the Carmichael coal mine. We argue that critical evaluation of the effects and potential consequences of simplified environmental activist narratives and the instrumentalisation of nonhumans is needed to support and enable activism that centres care and responsibility within multispecies entanglements. Engagement with the complexities of environmental intervention in relation to the finch, and not exclusively the mine, is also necessary to locate openings through which more-than-human futures can be creatively imagined and enacted.

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“…Prior research in other domains, such as willingness to pay for environmental protection, has shown that moral emotions are a central input into the valuation process ( Kahneman et al, 1998 )—especially when people do not have a strong prior about the “value” of an action or the decision domain is abstract and unfamiliar ( Slovic, 1995 ). Since emotion plays an important role to how people respond to information about climate change and environmental impact ( Rees et al, 2015 ; Duan and Bombara, 2022 ), and carbon offsetting appears to be associated with moral emotions, we hypothesized that emotionally and morally salient information might influence estimates of carbon offset requirements, even when the emotional information is normatively irrelevant to the task. If compensation for environmental impact is cognitively processed as a moral issue, people may perceive a larger need for compensation when negative emotions become more salient, such as those in which environmentally harmful emissions come from actions that are morally questionable.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moral spillover in carbon offset judgments

et al. 2022

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Moral spillover occurs when a morally loaded behavior becomes associated with another source. In the current paper, we addressed whether the moral motive behind causing CO2 emissions spills over on to how much people think is needed to compensate for the emissions. Reforestation (planting trees) is a common carbon-offset technique. With this in mind, participants estimated the number of trees needed to compensate for the carbon emissions from vehicles that were traveling with various moral motives. Two experiments revealed that people think larger carbon offsets are needed to compensate for the emissions when the emissions are caused by traveling for immoral reasons, in comparison with when caused by traveling for moral reasons. Hence, moral motives influence people’s judgments of carbon-offset requirements even though these motives have no bearing on what is compensated for. Moreover, the effect was insensitive to individual differences in carbon literacy and gender and to the unit (kilograms or tons) in which the CO2 emissions were expressed to the participants. The findings stress the role of emotion in how people perceive carbon offsetting.

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Visualizing climate change: the role of construal level, emotional valence, and visual literacy

Cited by 5 publications

References 85 publications

Visual images of the biological microcosmos: Viewers’ perception of realism, preference, and desire to explore

Visual images of the biological microcosmos: Viewers’ perception of realism, preference, and desire to explore

The finch in the coal mine: Interrogating the environmental politics of extinction narratives

Moral spillover in carbon offset judgments

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