(Online) Exploring climate change communication and environmental behaviour / Exploring climate change communication and environmental behaviour (pilot testing)

Background

The behavioural science field has identified behavioural levers and tailored communication strategies that have been shown to foster public awareness, beliefs, and actions towards environmental issues like climate change (CCC, 2022). Yet, the default approach to climate change communication is still often a one-size-fits-all approach (Corner et al., 2014; Judge et al., 2021; van den Broek et al., 2017). Climate change communication campaigns may be more effective if they were tailored to reflect key audience characteristics, such as values (Corner et al., 2014; Hornsey & Fielding, 2017). Understanding whether value-congruent communication can encourage pro-environmental behaviour may have significant practical implications for climate change communication strategies and campaigns.

Research Questions / Hypotheses

We aimed to explore whether value-congruent climate change messages can encourage both pro-environmental behavioural intentions and actual behaviour, such as donating to an environmental organisation. Several messages tailored to be congruent with biospheric, altruistic, hedonic, and egoistic values, and were designed to encourage pro-environmental behaviour were tested on behavioural intention and donation to an environmental organisation through an online experiment, exploring the differences between message congruence and value groups.

We tested the following hypotheses:

- Participants would indicate intentions to behave pro-environmentally when presented with a value-congruent message, compared to those who received an incongruent message, unframed message, or no message (H1)

- Participants who indicate behavioural intention to donate money to an environmental organisation followed through with this intention and did choose to donate money during the experiment (H2)

- Participants would donate money when presented with a value-congruent message, compared to those who received an incongruent message, unframed message, or no message (H3)

- Further, when presented with a list of organisations to donate to, participants who received a congruent message would choose to donate to an environmental organisation rather than a non-environmental organisation (H4)

- Of those who donate, participants who received a value-congruent message would donate a higher amount, compared to those who received an incongruent message, unframed message, or no message (H5)

- Biospheric and altruistic participants would donate a higher amount than egoistic and hedonic participants (H6)

- Participants would rate the tailored climate message more positively on a text evaluation index when presented with a value-congruent message compared to those who received an incongruent message, unframed message, or no message (H7)

Participants

Pilot testing was conducted before the main study with 57 REP participants to pre-test the climate change messages for any similarities. For the main study, 293 participants were recruited through the REP, although four responses were excluded from analyses due to participants either completing two attempts or failing to complete the whole study. The final sample included 289 participants, with most aged between 18-24 years (97%) and female (72%). Most participants had completed secondary schooling (78%) and spoke English (52%) or Chinese (28%) as their first language.

Methods

Participants first completed the Shortened Schwartz’s Value Scale (Steg et al., 2012) to measure their prioritised values. Participants were then randomly assigned to one of the following groups: Congruent, Incongruent, Unframed, or Control, and were presented with a message about climate change, dependent on their value scores and group assignment. The control group was not presented with a message. After reading a message, participants were required to evaluate it on persuasiveness and likeability. Next, a measure of behavioural intention was presented where participants indicated how likely they were to perform a variety of pro-environmental behaviours, based on Stern’s (2000) private and public sphere behaviours. To understand the influence of beliefs, environmental concern was measured through the revised New Ecological Paradigm scale (Dunlap et al., 2000). Participants were then asked for basic demographic information, including age, gender, education, and primary language. Finally, the study concluded with a direct measure of behaviour: donation to an environmental organisation (Clements et al., 2015). Participants were advised that they would receive a small monetary payment of $5 for their time to complete the study and that they had the option to donate all or part of this payment to an environmental organisation. If they chose to donate, participants were presented with a list of six organisations to choose from, with focuses on climate change, conservation, or non-environmental topics. Participants were then required to indicate how much of their payment they wished to donate before completing the study. Regardless of their decision to donate, participants’ remuneration was not affected.

Results

Overall, 62% of participants chose to donate their remuneration to an environmental organisation, with the mean donation amount being $4.71 AUD. No significant differences were found between groups on behavioural intention, donation to an environmental organisation, donation amount, or the text evaluation measure. Interestingly, there were significant differences between participants’ prioritised values and behavioural intention. Specifically, biospheric participants scored higher than altruistic, egoistic, and hedonic participants. Additionally, a significant small negative correlation existed between overall behavioural intention and donation as well as, specifically, intention to donate and donation.

Implications

Overall, the findings suggest that while value congruent messages alone may not be effective in promoting pro-environmental behaviour, however individual values are crucial in shaping behavioural intentions. The findings also demonstrate that behavioural intentions are not always predictive of actual behaviour, highlighting the need to measure actual behaviour in future research.