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Stories vs. facts: triggering emotion and action-taking on climate change

Stories vs. facts: triggering emotion and action-taking on climate change


Title: Stories vs. facts: triggering emotion and action-taking on climate change
Author: Morris, Brandi S.
Chrysochou, Polymeros
Christensen, Jacob Dalgaard
Lund Orquin, Jacob   orcid.org/0000-0001-9835-5835
Barraza, Jorge
Zak, Paul J.
Mitkidis, Panagiotis
Date: 2019-04-06
Language: English
Scope: 19-36
University/Institute: Háskólinn í Reykjavík
Reykjavik University
School: Viðskiptadeild (HR)
School of Business (RU)
Series: Climatic Change;154(1-2)
ISSN: 0165-0009
1573-1480 (eISSN)
DOI: 10.1007/s10584-019-02425-6
Subject: Atmospheric Science; Global and Planetary Change; Climate changes; Communication; Stories; Emotions; Affect (Psychology); Behavior; Loftslagsfræði; Hlýnun jarðar; Loftslagsbreytingar; Boðskipti; Tilfinningar; Áhrif (sálfræði); Atferli
URI: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11815/2109

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Citation:

Morris, B. S., Chrysochou, P., Christensen, J. D., Orquin, J. L., Barraza, J., Zak, P. J., & Mitkidis, P. (2019). Stories vs. facts: Triggering emotion and action-taking on climate change. Climatic Change, 154(1–2), 19–36. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-019-02425-6

Abstract:

Climate change is an issue which elicits low engagement, even among concerned segments of the public. While research suggests that the presentation of factual information (e.g., scientific consensus) can be persuasive to some audiences, there is also empirical evidence indicating that it may also increase resistance in others. In this research, we investigate whether climate change narratives structured as stories are better than informational narratives at promoting pro-environmental behavior in diverse audiences. We propose that narratives structured as stories facilitate experiential processing, heightening affective engagement and emotional arousal, which serve as an impetus for action-taking. Across three studies, we manipulate the structure of climate change communications to investigate how this influences narrative transportation, measures of autonomic reactivity indicative of emotional arousal, and pro-environmental behavior. We find that stories are more effective than informational narratives at promoting pro-environmental behavior (studies 1 and 3) and self-reported narrative transportation (study 2), particularly those with negatively valenced endings (study 3). The results of study 3 indicate that embedding information in story structure influences cardiac activity, and subsequently, pro-environmental behavior. These findings connect works from the fields of psychology, neuroscience, narratology, and climate change communication, advancing our understanding of how narrative structure influences engagement with climate change through emotional arousal, which likely incites pro-environmental behavior as the brain's way of optimizing bodily budgets.

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This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and repro-duction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

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