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Testing the impact of images in environmental campaigns
Abstract
Images are commonly used in environmental advocacy campaigns that are designed to promote collective action. However, the effects of different types of images have rarely been examined. In three experiments (combined N = 1426), we tested the impact of commonly used campaign images (meeting, protest, or no image) on willingness to engage in collective action against coal mining. Further, we examined whether images influence known drivers of collective action. Results support the Social Identity Model of Collective Action in environmental contexts: efficacy, identification and anger were strongly associated with collective action intentions and (less so) behaviour. Identification was the strongest predictor of actual behaviour. The effects of images were inconsistent. Image presence and type sometimes affected collective action responses, either directly or indirectly. The presence of an image sometimes increased perceptions of descriptive norms for action, which in turn increased perceived efficacy and collective action intentions.
... In the climate change arena, these assumptions appear to be validated by research showing large correlations between efficacy perceptions and pro-environmental intentions (Bamberg, Rees, & Seebauer, 2015;Gulliver, Chapman, Solly, & Schultz, 2020;Heath & Gifford, 2006;Hornsey & Fielding, 2016;Kim, Jeong, & Hwang, 2013;Xie, Brewer, Hayes, McDonald, & Newell, 2019). Furthermore, the presumed importance of efficacy and hope for change has spilled beyond the boundaries of academia (e.g., Moser, 2016;Stern, 2012) and embedded itself in the broad "Earth Optimism" movement, which focuses on the need to promote positive stories of change as a way of energizing the community and warding off despair and disillusionment. ...
... The final measure 2 was designed to provide an index of actual pro-environmental behavior, borrowing a technique used by Gulliver et al. (2020). Participants were asked to volunteer their time to answer a hundred questions comprised of simple math problems (for example "9 x 8 = ?") ...
... If this is true, approaches that rely on analytic forms of reasoningin which people are educated through facts and argumentation about why their individual actions can make a difference might struggle to have an impact. Consistent with this notion, it is notable that certain imageswhich appeal to non-analytic reasoning processesare associated with increased efficacy ratings (Gulliver et al., 2020;Hart & Feldman, 2016b;Metag, Schäfer, Füchslin, Barsuhn, & Königslöw, 2016;Ockwell et al., 2009;O'Neill, Boykoff, Niemeyer, & Day, 2013). ...
There is broad theoretical consensus that one way to promote climate-friendly behavior is to increase people's belief that their actions can make a difference (individual response efficacy). However, attempts to increase individual efficacy beliefs about climate change through explicit instruction have generally failed. In the current paper, two experiments tested an intervention designed to convince people that their individual actions spread and multiply, causing larger changes in interconnected systems (also known as ripple or butterfly effects). Participants were presented with four principles which explain how individual actions can have aggregate effects at the collective level: social norms, consumer pressure, political pressure, and snowball effects. Although Study 1 (N = 491) revealed promising effects of the intervention in terms of individual efficacy and pro-environmental intentions, the intervention did not influence actual behavior (i.e., donations to an environmental campaign). Further, when changes were made to the design to reduce social desirability processes, the interventions had no significant effects (Study 2; N = 801). We draw on these data – as well as previous failed attempts to promote individual efficacy – to extract theoretical implications for our understanding of how people internalize individual control over broad collective threats such as climate change.
... Circumstantial evidence for a social desirability process can also be gleaned from examining the intention-action gap. Whereas efficacy is powerfully correlated with measures of pro-environmental intentions, it shares trivial levels of variance with pro-environmental behaviour (Gulliver et al., 2020;Hornsey et al., 2021). In other words, efficacy ratings predict cost-free orientations towards being pro-environmental more so than mitigation behaviours that require actual sacrifice. ...
... Hart and Feldman (2016b) found that an image of a solar panel was sufficient to increase efficacy relative to a no-image control. More recently, Gulliver et al. (2020) tested how images that are embedded within environmental campaigns can influence collective responses. Across three experiments, they found some evidence to suggest that images of people taking action could enhance group efficacy by giving the sense that more people were engaging in collective action (note that this enhanced efficacy promoted collective action intentions, but not donations to the cause or petition-signing). ...
People who believe they have greater efficacy to address climate change are more likely to engage in pro-environmental behaviour. To confront the climate crisis, it will therefore be essential to understand the processes through which climate change efficacy is promoted. Some interventions in the literature assume that efficacy emerges from analytic reasoning processes: that it is deliberative, verbal, conscious, and influenced by information and education. In the current paper, we critique this notion. We review evidence showing that climate change efficacy perceptions are (a) associated with climate-related distress and threat, (b) prescribed by social norms, (c) associated with social desirability and identity-expressive concerns, (d) surprisingly difficult to change through explicit, verbal instruction, but (e) responsive to imagery. We conclude by examining applied implications of these five propositions and discuss why non-analytic processes might (ironically) be beneficial for sustaining green activism.
... The use of priming with images has the capacity to encourage pro-environmental behaviors among participants (Fanghella et al., 2019;Wu et al., 2013). Research shows that images can be an effective priming tool to increase one's connection to nature (Gulliver et al., 2020). ...
... Future detailed qualitative analyses could explore interrelations between distrust, threat, and other factors such as injustice and collective emotions. Studies 2 and 3 measured intentions rather than actual behaviour, which, while empirically correlated (Ajzen, 1991;Fishbein & Ajzen, 1974), have not consistently been connected with the same predictors in the collective action context (e.g., Gulliver et al., 2020). Following this, future research could seek to integrate Studies 2 and 3 by including both normative and violent collective action acceptance and intentions in a single path model. ...
In three studies, we examined the role of distrust and perceived threat in intentions to engage in normative and violent non‐normative collective action. A field‐based qualitative study of 35 pro‐democracy protestors during the 2019 Hong Kong Anti‐Extradition protests revealed that perceived threat to Hong Kong values alongside distrust of political institutions spurred collective action engagement and support for defensive violent collection action. In Study 2, a questionnaire (N = 639) testing pro‐democracy action intentions demonstrated direct paths on both normative and violent collective action intentions from distrust and threat. In Study 3 (N = 133), experimental trust and threat manipulations demonstrated a significant association between distrust and threat on violent collective action intentions and acceptance, and a significant interaction on acceptance of violent collective action. Our results reveal the importance of distrust and threat in attitudinal support for, and engagement in, collective action and their role in transitioning from non‐violent to violent collective action.
... The collective action and social identity-based perspective (including the SIMCA and the EMSICA) is an innovative approach to the conservation and management of wetlands, which has not been addressed by any wetland studies. However, related studies (see Bamberg et al., 2015;Fielding & Hornsey, 2016;Fritsche et al., 2018;Gulliver et al., 2020;Liu & Ravenscroft, 2017;van Zomeren et al., 2019) have been previously conducted on other areas, such as climate change, land use, and pro-environmental and sustainable behaviors. The SIMCA and the EMSICA are the first systematic and testable models that highlight the social identity variables associated with evaluating and responding to large-scale problems such as wetland destruction. ...
The purpose of this study was to explore the willingness of farmers to participate in the management and conservation of the wetlands in Iran. Theoretically, the present study introduces social identity models of collective action into the discourse of sustainable wetland management for the first time. The study site was Ghara Gheshlagh Wetland as one of the vital wetlands in northwestern Iran. The present applied research was conducted using a cross-sectional survey. The statistical population was the farming communities around the Ghara Gheshlagh Wetland. A proportionally allocated multi-staged stratified random sampling approach was employed to select 373 farmers as a representative sample. The data collection tool was a closed-ended questionnaire whose validity and reliability were tested and approved. The results indicated that the social identity model of collective action (SIMCA) and the encapsulation model of social identity in collective action (EMSICA) were able to explain 0.45 and 0.40 of the variance changes in the farmers' willingness to participate in the management and conservation of the wetland. This finding reveals that the environmental and wetland policies and management practice require collective determination, formation of collective identity beliefs, and we thinking system. Therefore, the SIMCA can better assist wetland managers, policy-makers, practitioners, and socio-ecological intervenors than the EMSICA because of its emphasis on social identity.
... The findings lend support to the idea that images are often the first thing people focus on when looking at a campaign message and that this affects subsequent verbal message processing (Gulliver et al., 2020;Sajjacholapunt & Ball, 2014). We therefore recommend future research to further explore interaction effects between gaze direction and verbal text. ...
Due to an increased competition for volunteers, nonprofit organizations have intensified efforts to recruit members as volunteers. But how to effectively persuade members to volunteer using visual communication? Research suggests that images are most persuasive when they demand something from the viewer. A demand is expressed through the depiction of a person who directly gazes at the viewer, whereas an offer is expressed through the depiction of a face with an averted gaze. Demands and offers can also be expressed verbally. A verbal demand is articulated through commands, whereas a verbal offer is conveyed through statements. This study examines whether NPOs should address their members using demands or offers and whether correspondence between image and text increases persuasion. An experiment among 205 members of a Swiss NPO finds that direct gaze images are most effective. However, image-text matching increases persuasion for campaigns that feature an averted gaze image.
... This potential is important given the growing evidence that efficacy perceptions are resistant to change via verbal or text communications that target explicit, deliberative reasoning processes; rather, efficacy beliefs are shifted more through non-analytic, experiential, and image-based processes [88]. For example, images of people taking pro-environmental actions (e.g., protesting, walking or riding bikes, choosing "green" products at the store) may enhance efficacy beliefs by conveying that many others also are able to engage in those actions [89]. ...
Climate change poses a multifaceted, complex, and existential threat to human health and well-being, but efforts to communicate these threats to the public lag behind what we know how to do in communication research. Effective communication about climate change’s health risks can improve a wide variety of individual and population health-related outcomes by: (1) helping people better make the connection between climate change and health risks and (2) empowering them to act on that newfound knowledge and understanding. The aim of this manuscript is to highlight communication methods that have received empirical support for improving knowledge uptake and/or driving higher-quality decision making and healthier behaviors and to recommend how to apply them at the intersection of climate change and health. This expert consensus about effective communication methods can be used by healthcare professionals, decision makers, governments, the general public, and other stakeholders including sectors outside of health. In particular, we argue for the use of 11 theory-based, evidence-supported communication strategies and practices. These methods range from leveraging social networks to making careful choices about the use of language, narratives, emotions, visual images, and statistics. Message testing with appropriate groups is also key. When implemented properly, these approaches are likely to improve the outcomes of climate change and health communication efforts.
In view of global environmental deterioration and climate change, researchers from multiple fields of the behavioral sciences examine the determinants of pro-environmental behavior. Research on pro-environmental behavior is dominated by the use of self-report measures, which relates to critical validity problems. Some of these problems can be addressed by studying consequential behavior in behavioral paradigms (i.e., systematically arranged situations of actual environmental relevance). However, pro-environmental behavior paradigms have been scattered across disciplines, and many researchers may not be aware of the wealth of available paradigms. The present review aims to acquaint researchers across disciplinary borders with the behavioral paradigms developed to study pro-environmental behavior in different domains. A systematic literature search revealed 99 ad hoc paradigms and five validated paradigms of pro-environmental behavior. I review how different authors have succeeded in implementing the consequences of pro-environmental behavior in standardized field, laboratory, or online situations, point to caveats in the use of behavioral paradigms, and illustrate how researchers can select a paradigm for their own research.
Environmental awareness campaigns disseminate information about the state of the natural environment, aiming to affect public attitudes and encourage pro-environmental behavior. I test the influence of awareness days on the general public's environmental and climate change attitudes and concern, focusing on the case of the Earth Hour, an international campaign organized annually by the World Wide Fund for Nature. The Earth Hour highlights environmental consequences of human activity and encourages sustainable behavior, culminating with a call to mass action. To assess the Earth Hour's effect, I use longitudinal data from Germany and the UK, exploiting the orthogonality of the Earth Hour observance to the timing of data collection, to estimate models comparing individual attitudes and concern before and after the event. I find no evidence of an Earth Hour effect on environmental and climate change attitudes and concern. Results suggest that more research is needed to assess the influence of environmental advocacy campaigns and awareness days on the general public.
Advocacy is intended to change people's attitudes and behavior. Yet the psychological and behavioral consequences of advocacy have rarely been considered. Across 3 experiments (combined N = 934) in the contexts of debates around racial discrimination and abortion, we investigated if and how exposure to advocacy can influence collective giving responses: self‐reported willingness to make donations congruent with one's beliefs on the issue and actual giving behavior. Reading tweets from one's own side of a contentious debate sometimes indirectly mobilized collective giving responses by enhancing perceptions of efficacy and ensuring people empathized and identified with highlighted victim groups. Simultaneously, however, supporting advocacy sometimes inadvertently suppressed action by reducing anger and perceived injustice. Results therefore show that advocacy can simultaneously mobilize and demobilize support. However, effects were not found consistently across contexts and donation measures. Overall, mobilization pathways were stronger, especially on donation behavior and in the context of the abortion debate. Results suggest advocacy can work broadly as intended: by influencing the attitudes and behaviors of audience members. Online advocacy exposure in social media echo chambers may therefore be contributing to political polarization. Finally, results also demonstrate that charitable giving can be a form of collective action.
This Element reviews the social psychology of effective collective action, highlighting the importance of considering activists' goals, timeframes, and psychological perspectives in seeking to conceptualise this construct. A novel framework 'ABIASCA' maps effectiveness in relation to activists' goals for mobilisation and change (Awareness raising; Building sympathy; turning sympathy into Intentions; turning intentions into Actions; Sustaining groups over time; Coalition-building; and Avoiding opponents' counter-mobilisation). We also review the DIME model of Disidentification, Innovation, Moralization and Energization, which examines the effects of failure in creating trajectories of activists' disidentification from collective action; innovation (including to radicalisation or deradicalisation); and increased moral conviction and energy. The social psychological drivers of effective collective action for four audiences are examined in detail, in four sections: for the self and supporters, bystanders, opponents, and for third parties. We conclude by highlighting an agenda for future research, and drawing out key messages for scholars.
Effectively fighting global warming requires large groups to engage in concerted action. In the present review article we aim to understand how human appraisals and responses to the challenge of climate change are shaped by social identities (i.e. people’s membership in specific social groups). We first describe the recent Social Identity Model of Pro-Environmental Action (SIMPEA), linking social identity theorizing to the study of climate action. Then, we review research on how collective climate action is driven by social identification, ingroup norms, group-based emotions, and collective efficacy beliefs. Finally, we focus on how very inclusive social identities (spatially or temporally), such as global identification, may provide a unique opportunity to advance interventions fostering people’s climate action.
Advocacy is intended to change people's attitudes and behavior. Yet the psychological and behavioral consequences of advocacy have rarely been considered. Across 3 experiments (combined N = 934) in the contexts of debates around racial discrimination and abortion, we investigated if and how exposure to advocacy can influence collective giving responses: self‐reported willingness to make donations congruent with one's beliefs on the issue and actual giving behavior. Reading tweets from one's own side of a contentious debate sometimes indirectly mobilized collective giving responses by enhancing perceptions of efficacy and ensuring people empathized and identified with highlighted victim groups. Simultaneously, however, supporting advocacy sometimes inadvertently suppressed action by reducing anger and perceived injustice. Results therefore show that advocacy can simultaneously mobilize and demobilize support. However, effects were not found consistently across contexts and donation measures. Overall, mobilization pathways were stronger, especially on donation behavior and in the context of the abortion debate. Results suggest advocacy can work broadly as intended: by influencing the attitudes and behaviors of audience members. Online advocacy exposure in social media echo chambers may therefore be contributing to political polarization. Finally, results also demonstrate that charitable giving can be a form of collective action.
Studies of activism and political participation have shown increasing interest in the relationship between photographs and activism. Most contributions are premised on the assumption that photographs have an impact on opinions, knowledge, and/or mobilising motivations. However, such causalities are rarely documented, and when it comes to what is arguably one of the most central questions in the field of activism and participation studies, why some people act and participate, and others do not, there is a near total absence of systematic knowledge on the impact of photographs. Taking the 2015 refugee crisis as its case, this article addresses the effect of photographs on individual willingness to participate politically using an experimental survey. While the hypothesis was that the inclusion of photographs in a call for action should lead to increased willingness to participate, the results showed that adding photographs had no significant effect on individuals’ willingness to participate. A possible explanation for this is the timing of the survey, in December 2015. By then, the debates on the refugee crisis were surrounded by less uncertainty, and opinions had crystallised.
Do images affect online political mobilization? If so, how? These questions are of fundamental importance to scholars of social movements, contentious politics, and political behavior generally. However, little prior work has systematically addressed the role of images in mobilizing online participation in social movements. We first confirm that images have a positive mobilizing effect in the context of online protest activity. We then argue that images are mobilizing because they trigger stronger emotional reactions than text. Building on existing political psychology models, we theorize that images evoking enthusiasm, anger, and fear should be particularly mobilizing, while sadness should be demobilizing. We test the argument through a study of Twitter activity related to a Black Lives Matter protest. We find that both images in general and some of the proposed emotional attributes (enthusiasm and fear) contribute to online participation. The results hold when controlling for alternative theoretical mechanisms for why images should be mobilizing, and for the presence of frequent image features. Our paper provides evidence supporting the broad argument that images increase the likelihood of a protest to spread online while teasing out the mechanisms at play in a new media environment.
Despite extensive exploration into the use of language in climate change communication, our understanding of the use of visual images, and how they relate to public perceptions of climate change, is less developed. A limited set of images have come to represent climate change, but rapid changes in the digital landscape, in the way media and information are created, conveyed, and consumed has changed the way climate change is visualised. We review the use of climate imagery in digital media (news and social media, art, video and visualisations), and synthesise public perceptions research on factors that are important for engaging with climate imagery. We then compare how key research findings and recommendations align with the practical strategies of campaigners and communicators, highlighting opportunities for greater congruence. Finally, we outline key challenges and recommendations for future directions in research. The increasingly image-focused digital landscape signals that images of climate change have a pivotal role in building public engagement, both now, and in future. A better understanding of how these images are being used and understood by the public is crucial for communicating climate change in an engaging way.
Research on visual effects constitutes a fertile new and expanding area of scholarship. This entry describes the variety of cognitive, attitudinal, and behavioral aspects of study in this area. It seeks to understand the dimension of scholarship in visualization effects and therefore connects visual communication research to the mainstream communication field. It offers insights into functions and effects of visual content and informs about challenges and research trends in visual studies. Although the literature on visual effects has a relatively rich tradition, increasingly contemporary scholars are working to provide striking new insights into how imagery interacts with other modalities of information. Such insights create a new dimension to visual effects research and link this area to newer forms of communication inquiry.
Several discrete emotions have broad theoretical and empirical importance, as shown by converging evidence from diverse areas of psychology, including facial displays, developmental behaviors, and neuroscience. However, the measurement of these states has not progressed along with theory, such that when researchers measure subjectively experienced emotions, they commonly rely on scales assessing broad dimensions of affect (positivity and negativity), rather than discrete emotions. The current manuscript presents four studies that validate a new instrument, the Discrete Emotions Questionnaire (DEQ), that is sensitive to eight distinct state emotions: anger, disgust, fear, anxiety, sadness, happiness, relaxation, and desire. Emotion theory supporting the importance of distinguishing these specific emotions is reviewed.
Prevalent in mass media worldwide, climate change imagery appears to be similar across countries. Replicating a study from the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, we analyze whether these images are perceived in similar ways cross-nationally by studying Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. A total of 75 respondents sorted images with respect to their perceptions of salience and self-efficacy (Q method). They associated images of climate change impacts most strongly with salience, while they related imagery of renewable energies and mobility to self-efficacy. These findings suggest that perceptions of climate change visuals are largely consistent cross-culturally. They indicate that imagery that is frequently used in media is rarely associated with feelings of salience or self-efficacy.
The news of recent mobilizations in Arab, European, and North-American countries quickly spread across the globe. Well before written reports analyzing the unfolding mobilizations, images of protests circulated widely through television channels, print newspapers, internet websites, and social media platforms. Pictures and videos of squares full of people protesting against their governments became the symbols of a new wave of contention that quickly spread from Tunisia to many other countries. Pictures and videos showing the gathering of people in Tahrir square (Egypt), Puerta del Sol (Spain), and Zuccotti Park (United States) quickly became vivid tools of “countervisuality” (Mirzoeff, 2011) that opposed the roaring grassroots political participation of hundreds of thousands people to the silent decisions taken in government and corporation buildings by small groups of politicians and managers. The presence, and relevance, of images in mobilizations of social movements is no novelty. Encounters with social movements have always been intrinsically tied to the visual sense. Activists articulate visual messages, their activities are represented in photos and video sequences, and they are ultimately rendered visible, or invisible, in the public sphere. Social movements produce and evoke images, either as a result of a planned, explicit, and strategic effort, or accidentally, in an unintended or undesired manner. At the same time, social movements are perceived by external actors and dispersed audiences via images which are produced both by themselves and others.
Visuals in news media help define, or frame issues, but less is known about how they influence opinions and behavior. The authors use an experiment to present image and text exemplars of frames from war and conflict news in isolation and in image-text congruent and incongruent pairs. Results show that, when presented alone, images generate stronger framing effects on opinions and behavioral intentions than text. When images and text are presented together, as in a typical news report, the frame carried by the text influences opinions regardless of the accompanying image, whereas the frame carried by the image drives behavioral intentions irrespective of the linked text. These effects are explained by the salience enhancing and emotional consequences of visuals.
There seems to be consensus that apart from individual behavioral change, system-wide transformations are required to address the challenges posed by climate change. Collective action is viewed as one core mechanism in social transformation but there is currently no systematic research on collective climate action. By reviewing theoretical perspectives and models explaining collective protest, we aim to provide a starting point for such a research program. Based on correlational data from a student sample (N = 652), a sample of participants of a local climate protection initiative (N = 71), and visitors of a climate protection event (N = 88), we tested constructs derived from these theoretical models. Social identity, perceived behavioral control, and participative efficacy beliefs consistently predicted substantial amounts of variance in participation intention. Implications for future research are discussed, such as recognizing the interplay between cost-benefit calculations and social identity, or temporal dynamics in collective action engagement.
This paper presents a multimodal research design for the standardized content analysis of climate change coverage in print media. The concepts of framing, narration, and visual representation are integrated into a single coding instrument that can be applied to large-scale media samples from different countries. The proposed research design combines existing measures and novel operationalization. Intercoder reliability scores are reported from a pretest covering newspaper material from Germany, India, South Africa, and the USA. Most variables can be reliably applied across these very different countries, with some exceptions in the more exploratory narrative segment of the analysis. The paper also shows how a multimodal approach to coding climate change coverage can help to avoid potentially one-sided interpretations based on single-mode approaches.
Most nonprofit organizations rely on gifts of time and money to support their operations. However, research by nonprofit scholars on the behavioral mechanisms of charity remains underdeveloped. One methodological tool, the randomized and controlled field experiment, has not been fully embraced by nonprofit scholars publishing in nonprofit journals. This is a missed opportunity. This essay argues that the leading theoretical models on charity can and should be tested by nonprofit scholars using field experiments in partnership with nonprofit organizations. The resultant findings may contribute to the literatures on giving, altruism and collective action. Importantly, field experiments can also provide tangible knowledge for nonprofit managers seeking to improve their operations, a common interest of both scholars and practitioners.
Research dealing with various aspects of* the theory of planned behavior (Ajzen, 1985,
1987) is reviewed, and some unresolved issues are discussed. In broad terms, the theory is
found to be well supported by empirical evidence. Intentions to perform behaviors of different
kinds can be predicted with high accuracy from attitudes toward the behavior, subjective
norms, and perceived behavioral control; and these intentions, together with perceptions of
behavioral control, account for considerable variance in actual behavior. Attitudes, subjective
norms, and perceived behavioral control are shown to be related to appropriate sets of salient
behavioral, normative, and control beliefs about the behavior, but the exact nature of these
relations is still uncertain. Expectancy value formulations are found to be only partly
successful in dealing with these relations. Optimal rescaling of expectancy and value
measures is offered as a means of dealing with measurement limitations. Finally, inclusion of
past behavior in the prediction equation is shown to provide a means of testing the theory*s
sufficiency, another issue that remains unresolved. The limited available evidence concerning
this question shows that the theory is predicting behavior quite well in comparison to the
ceiling imposed by behavioral reliability.
Given the rising use of visual and multimodal information, text-oriented framing research is at risk of losing traction with current media reality. We propose applying frame processing theory as a general framework for understanding how coherent meaning is constructed from complex stimuli, regardless of their modality: Both visual and textual information processing follow a recursive sequence of (a) selective perception/structuring, (b) decoding, (c) the construction of relations, and (d) their integration into coherent meaning. The specifics of visual and textual modalities provide varying degrees of structuring and salience within a fundamentally unified information processing process. Integrating advances from framing and visual communication research, we discuss implications for the empirical analysis of multimodal news contents, and sketch an agenda for research.
The aims of the current paper are to contribute to theorizing in the field of collective action and also to bring this body of research closer with the literature on climate change. We suggest integrating the concept of social norms into the social identity model of collective action, to investigate the determinants of individuals' collective climate action intention. We argue that perceived social norms will be helpful in understanding the social identity-collective action link. Consistent with the proposed model, participants' (N = 538) intention to take part in a neighborhood-based climate protection initiative was predicted via all of the model constructs (social identity, perceived collective efficacy, and group-based emotions) but most strongly so by the perceived participation norm, which also fully mediated the effect of social identity on participation intention. Further analyses suggested that the emotional motivation to engage in collective climate action was based on group-based guilty conscience rather than anger. Discussion focuses on the importance of social context in understanding and combating climatic change, the emotionally flexible motivations behind different forms of collective action, and the role of group identification in interventions aimed at promoting pro-environmental behavior. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
We tested whether knowing more about an area where a humanitarian disaster happened would increase willingness to donate to its victims. Knowledge was proposed to have a positive impact on donation proclivity, mediated by greater identification with the victims: The more potential donors know about the victims and their environment, the more are they able to identify with the victims. Identification, in turn, was proposed to positively impact on willingness to donate. Results confirmed these predictions in one correlational study (N= 111), one experimental study (N= 200), and one quasi‐experimental study (N= 100), focusing on the Asian Tsunami of 2004 and the Chinese earthquake of 2008. Theoretical and applied implications of the research findings are discussed.
Despite their ethical intentions, ethically minded consumers rarely purchase ethical products (Auger and Devinney: 2007, Journal of Business Ethics
76, 361–383). This intentions–behaviour gap is important to researchers and industry, yet poorly understood (Belk et al.: 2005, Consumption, Markets and Culture
8(3), 275–289). In order to push the understanding of ethical consumption forward, we draw on what is known about the intention–behaviour
gap from the social psychology and consumer behaviour literatures and apply these insights to ethical consumerism. We bring
together three separate insights – implementation intentions (Gollwitzer: 1999, American Psychologist
54(7), 493–503), actual behavioural control (ABC) (Ajzen and Madden: 1986, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
22, 453–474; Sheeran et al.: 2003, Journal of Social Psychology, 42, 393–410) and situational context (SC) (Belk: 1975, Journal of Consumer Research
2, 157–164) – to construct an integrated, holistic conceptual model of the intention–behaviour gap of ethically minded consumers.
This holistic conceptual model addresses significant limitations within the ethical consumerism literature, and moves the
understanding of ethical consumer behaviour forward. Further, the operationalisation of this model offers insight and strategic
direction for marketing managers attempting to bridge the intention–behaviour gap of the ethically minded consumer.
Keywordsactual behavioural control-consumer ethics-ethical consumerism-implementation intentions-intention–behaviour gap-perceived behavioural control-situational context-theory of planned behaviour-word–deed gap
Structural equation modeling (SEM) is a vast field and widely used by many applied researchers in the social and behavioral sciences. Over the years, many software pack-ages for structural equation modeling have been developed, both free and commercial. However, perhaps the best state-of-the-art software packages in this field are still closed-source and/or commercial. The R package lavaan has been developed to provide applied researchers, teachers, and statisticians, a free, fully open-source, but commercial-quality package for latent variable modeling. This paper explains the aims behind the develop-ment of the package, gives an overview of its most important features, and provides some examples to illustrate how lavaan works in practice.
This article answers calls from scholars to attend to a research gap concerning the visual representation of climate change. We present results from three Q-methodology workshops held in Melbourne (Australia), Norwich (UK) and Boulder (USA) investigating engagement with climate change imagery drawn from mass media sources. Participants were provided with a concourse of climate change images drawn from a newspaper content analysis carried out across all three countries, and asked to carry out two Q-sorts: first, for salience (‘this image makes me feel climate change is important’) and second, for efficacy (‘this image makes me feel I can do something about climate change’). We found results remarkably consistent both across and within country cohorts. This may indicate the presence of a dominant, mainstream discourse around climate imagery. We found that imagery of climate impacts promotes feelings of salience, but undermines self-efficacy; that imagery of energy futures imagery promotes self-efficacy; and that images of politicians and celebrities strongly undermine saliency, and undermine self-efficacy for the Australian cohort. These results, if widely replicable, have implications for climate change communication and engagement. Our results suggest that imagery plays a role in either increasing the sense of importance of the issue of climate change (saliency), or in promoting feelings of being able to do something about climate change (efficacy) – but few, if any, images seem to do both. Communications strategies should assess the purpose of their messages, considering these findings regarding salience and efficacy in this study, and choose to employ images accordingly.
When rational actors believe that their group can achieve its goals through collective action (i.e.,
when they have strong group efficacy beliefs), they should not participate in it because they expect
little benefit from their own participation. Paradoxically, however, research shows that individuals are
more likely to participate when their group efficacy beliefs are stronger. In contrast to approaches
that explain this paradox by invoking different psychological mechanisms (e.g., group identity, groupbased
anger), we provide a novel efficacy-based explanation by introducing the notion of participative
efficacy beliefs (i.e., beliefs that one’s own actions will “make a difference” to collective efforts aimed at
achieving group goals). Three correlational studies supported the construct and predictive validity
of participative efficacy beliefs across different samples and contexts. We discuss the theoretical and
practical implications of this notion for the psychology of collective action and social change.
Shale gas is a novel source of fossil fuel which is extracted by induced hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking". This article examines the socio-political dimension of fracking as manifested in the UK press at three key temporal points in the debate on the practice. Three newspaper corpora were analysed qualitatively using Thematic Analysis and Social Representations Theory. Three overarching themes are discussed: "April-May 2011: From Optimism to Scepticism"; "November 2011: (De-)Constructing and Re-Constructing Risk and Danger"; "April 2012: Consolidating Social Representations of Fracking". In this article, we examine the emergence of and inter-relations between competing social representations, discuss the dynamics of threat positioning and show how threat can be re-construed in order to serve particular socio-political ends in the debate on fracking.
This article examines whether and how moral convictions, defined as strong and absolute stances on moralized issues, motivate advantaged group members to challenge social inequality. Specifically, we propose that violations of moral convictions against social inequality motivate collective action against it by increasing identification with the victims of social inequality. Such identification links the current work with the Social Identity Model of Collective Action (SIMCA; Van Zomeren, Postmes, & Spears, 2008, in press), which predicts that individuals’ motivation to challenge social inequality requires a relevant social identity in which group-based anger and group efficacy beliefs motivate collective action. For the advantaged, moral convictions are therefore powerful motivators of collective action against social inequality. Two studies, conducted in the Netherlands and Hong Kong, replicated empirical support for this line of thought. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings for collective action among the advantaged.
The authors examine whether self-efficacy relates to the environmentally responsible behavior of recycling and whether intrinsic motivation serves to mediate the relationship between self-efficacy and recycling. The authors measure those constructs, along with extrinsic motivation and the self- regulatory behaviors of satisfaction with and intentions toward recycling. Residents (n = 1,501) of 55 localities in Cordoba Spain are interviewed at home. Results show that all variables are positively related to self-reported recycling, except that extrinsic motivation is negatively related to recycling. As the authors hypothesize, the relationship between self-efficacy and recycling diminishes when intrinsic motivation is added to the model, which suggests that intrinsic motivation accounts for some of the relationship between self-efficacy and recycling. With the use of structural equation modelling, all variables, except extrinsic motivation, provide a good model fit; explained variance in reported in-home recycling is also substantial (adjusted R2 = .45). The meditational analysis provides insight regarding the dynamics of motivation; the model suggests that self-efficacy relates to recycling directly, by giving rise to intrinsic motivation, which in turn relates to recycling.
Visual communication is a critical but frequently under-estimated contributor to the ‘social and cultural life’ of environmental issues. This paper uses both content and discourse analysis to examine how visual communication is deployed in print media coverage of climate change issues in Canada. The Canadian case is internationally significant, given that Canada ratified the Kyoto Protocol but has since become obstructionist on the global stage. Our analysis, which focuses on image-language interactions, leads us to conclude that climate change is being inconsistently narrated to Canadians in this regard. While the power of visual communication comes from its ability to blend fact and emotion, to engage audiences, and to add narrative complexity to linguistic claims (and vice versa), we find instead a profound disjuncture between images and text in climate change coverage. In this case, visual and linguistic communication tend to pull in different narrative directions, advancing unrelated and sometimes contradictory claims that frequently confuse different aspects and positions on climate change.
This paper integrates literature from the social sciences and humanities concerning the persuasive impact of visual material, highlighting issues of emotion and identification. Visuals are used not only to illustrate news and feature genres but also in advertising and campaigns that attempt to persuade their target audiences to change attitudes and behaviours. These include health, safety and charity campaigns, that attempt to socially engineer change in people’s beliefs, attitudes and behaviours. With the increasing presence of such visuals comes a more emotive media environment with which people are forced to engage, and, under certain circumstances, disengage.
The present study utilises social representations theory to explore common sense conceptualisations of global warming risk using an in-depth, qualitative methodology. Fifty-six members of a British, London-based 2008 public were initially asked to draw or write four spontaneous "first thoughts or feelings" about global warming. These were then explored via an open-ended, exploratory interview. The analysis revealed that first thoughts, either drawn or written, often mirrored the images used by the British press to depict global warming visually. Thus in terms of media framings, it was their visual rather than their textual content that was spontaneously available for their audiences. Furthermore, an in-depth exploration of interview data revealed that global warming was structured around three themata: self/other, natural/unnatural and certainty/uncertainty, reflecting the complex and often contradictory nature of common sense thinking in relation to risk issues.
Recent research has found that dynamic norms—information about collective change in behavior—can promote meaningful personal behavior change, even if that behavior is not currently the norm. Through what psychological processes do dynamic norms operate? We theorized that, when others change, it can lead observers to infer that whatever factors had loomed large as barriers to change do not, in fact, prevent change. If so, dynamic norms may alter diverse salient mechanisms of personal change, and encourage behavior change in diverse contexts. Investigating four domains—smokers' intention to quit, dietary choice, sleep-related behavior, and men's identification as feminist—Experiments 1–4 found that dynamic norms affected three well-established mechanisms of personal behavior change across contexts: the belief that personal change is possible (increased self-efficacy), the belief that change is important to others (injunctive norms), and the belief that change is compatible with one's social identity. In each case, change in the psychological process also statistically mediated change in personal interest and intentions to change. Experiment 5 tested our hypothesis that psychological barriers that loom large would be remedied most. Manipulating the salience of all three barriers within a single context, we found that dynamic norms had a larger impact on salient than less salient barriers. The results suggest that dynamic norms can help resolve diverse psychological barriers to encourage personal change, especially salient barriers. They may thus be a particularly robust source of social influence across contexts.
Gender, age, religiosity, and political orientation are often associated with a propensity to give to charity. However, these broad associations mask inconsistencies that are not yet understood. Just as identity plays an important role in shaping consumer choices generally, donors’ identities could explain diverging associations between demographic social categories and the types of charities supported. Two studies, with confirmed workplace giving donors (N = 675) and a community sample of self‐reported donors (N = 376) in Australia, provide evidence that associations significantly vary across categories of charity. Specifically, older donors are more likely to support religious and health charities; religious donors are more likely to support religious, welfare, and international organizations, but less likely to support animal charities; and politically conservative donors are less likely than liberal donors to donate to international organizations. The findings are interpreted through the lens of identity, with a focus on how group priorities and relevant norms may affect charity selection. The results have implications for nonprofit marketing practice, including targeting, channel selection, and framing of fundraising appeals.
Surprisingly, hope is under-researched in contemporary social-psychological explanations of collective action and social change. This may be because collective action research typically focuses on “high-hope” contexts in which it is generally assumed that change is possible (the main appraisal of hope), and thus the main question is whether “we” can change the situation through collective action (i.e., group efficacy beliefs). This line of thought implies that such beliefs should only motivate collective action when hope is high. To test this hypothesis, we conducted three experiments in contexts that were not “high-hope”. In Study 1, conducted within the “low-hope” context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we found that manipulated group efficacy beliefs did not increase individuals’ collective action intentions. Studies 2 and 3 used the contexts of NHS privatization in the United Kingdom and Gun Control Reform in the United States --- contexts that were neither “low-hope” nor “high-hope”, which enabled us to manipulate hope and group efficacy beliefs together in one design. Consistent with our hypothesis, findings of both experiments revealed that group efficacy beliefs only predicted collective action when hope was high. Replicating Study 1, when hope was low, group efficacy had no effect on collective action intentions. We discuss our findings in light of the idea that only when hope for social change is established, the question of whether “we” can create change through collective action becomes relevant. Without hope, there can be no basis for agency, which informs goal-directed action.
How does priming identity affect charitable giving? We show that individuals are more likely to donate when a facet of their identity associated with a norm of generosity is primed in an appeal. In large charitable giving field experiments run by the American Red Cross, appeals that prime an individual’s identity as a previous donor to the charity or as a member of a local community generate more donations. The primes are more effective when they highlight a facet of the potential donor’s identity that we hypothesize to be more relevant to his sense of self: priming identity as a previous donor is more effective for more regular donors and priming identity as a local community member is more effective for people in smaller communities. Together, these results elucidate the impact of identity on behavior and demonstrate how identity primes can be implemented in practice to encourage public good provision.
This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.
Within multimodal persuasive messages, the roles of visual cues in producing unintended effects have been understudied. In an experiment on a sample of former and current smokers (N = 991), we manipulated the presence of visual vaping cues within electronic cigarette video advertisements (N = 25) to evaluate opinions towards vape-free policies. Such cues diminished the effects of pro-vaping arguments to increase support for vape-free policies, inadvertently benefiting public health. Consistent with the moral foundations theory (MFT), endorsement of the care/harm moral foundation strengthened message effects. Furthermore, cognitions and emotions related to moral intuitions mediated the effects of visual vaping cues. These findings suggest that MFT can help explain unintended effects of visual cues when outcomes are related to morality.
Using a national sample, this study experimentally tests the effects of news visuals and texts that emphasize either the causes and impacts of climate change or actions that can be taken to address climate change. We test the effects of variations in text and imagery on discrete emotions (i.e., hope, fear, and anger) and, indirectly, on support for climate mitigation policies. Political ideology is examined as a moderator. The findings indicate that news images and texts that focus on climate-oriented actions can increase hope and, in the case of texts, decrease fear and anger, and these effects generally hold across the ideological spectrum. In turn, the influence of emotions on policy support depends on ideology: Hope and fear increase support for climate policies for all ideological groups but particularly conservatives, whereas anger polarizes the opinions of liberals and conservatives. Implications for climate change communication that appeals to emotions are discussed.
This experimental study investigates how imagery and text in news coverage of climate change affect perceptions of issue importance, efficacy, and intentions to conserve energy and engage in climate change-related political behavior. The results reveal that images of solar panels and texts that discuss actions to address climate change increase individuals’ perceptions of efficacy. Perceived efficacy and issue importance each have a positive association with behavior change. In contrast to previous studies, the present investigation finds no evidence that exposure to images of either climate impacts or climate pollution negatively influence perceived efficacy or positively influence perceived issue importance.
Persuasive appeals sometimes include expressions of anger in an attempt to influence message recipients' thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors. The current research investigated how angry expressions change the way in which a persuasive appeal is considered. In five experiments, participants reported more favorable attitudes towards strong than weak appeals attributed to sources expressing anger, indicating careful processing of those appeals. However, participants reported equally favorable attitudes towards appeals attributed to sources expressing other emotions, indicating a lack of careful processing. Angry expressions induced extensive processing even in those not dispositionally inclined to do so, and also influenced attitudes towards issues related to, but not specifically addressed in, the appeal. Mediation and causal-chain analyses indicate that extensive processing was induced by the threat signaled by angry expressions.
In a field experiment, we examined whether conveying descriptive social norms (e.g., “this is what most people do”) increases charitable giving. Additionally, we examined whether people are more likely to conform to the local norms of one’s immediate environment than to more global norms extending beyond one’s local environment. University students received a charity organization’s information brochure and were asked for a monetary contribution. An experimental descriptive norm manipulation was embedded in the brochure. We found that providing people with descriptive norms increased charitable giving substantially compared with industry standard altruistic appeals (control condition). Moreover, conveying local norms were more effective in increasing charitable giving than conveying global norms. Practical implications for charity organizations and marketing are proposed.
Whereas the role of social media in political activism has received much attention in recent years, the role of social media images remains largely understudied. Given the potential of emotional and efficacy-related visual content for motivating activism, this exploratory content analysis examined the content of Twitter images of the 2011 Egyptian revolution. The analysis of 581 images revealed more efficacy-eliciting (crowds, protest activities, national and religious symbols) than emotionally arousing (violent) content, especially posted by Egyptian users. However, emotionally arousing content decreased, whereas efficacy-eliciting content increased at times of instability. Furthermore, popularity of images was more associated with user information than the content itself. Images posted by activists and users outside Egypt received the most attention. The findings are discussed in terms of possible explanations for the content patterns and their potential impact on Twitter audience, as well as their contributions toward establishing a theory of user-generated content during political movements.
Images of climate change and global warming - including tens of thousands of photographs, charts, graphs, cartoons, illustrations, and moving images - have been spread across magazines, television, and films, and are scrolling down the growing array of websites devoted to some aspect of environmental news and climate change. The content of climate imagery falls into several broad categories, and not all of them have been effective in educating people about the dangers and causes of climate change or encouraging civic action and involvement. A new framing of local climate impacts and positive actions may encourage more people to take action. © The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav.
Viewing images of terrorism can have a powerful impact on individuals' emotional and political responses, yet little is known about the psychological processes underlying these effects. We hypothesized that the content of terrorism images will shape viewers' appraisals of the event, which will elicit specific emotions and political attitudes. British citizens viewed photographs of the 2005 London bombings, either focusing on victims or terrorists. Exposure to images of victims increased appraisals of victim suffering, which predicted feelings of sympathy. Exposure to images of terrorists increased appraisals of terrorists as dangerous, which predicted fear; and of the attack as unjust, which predicted anger. Each emotion predicted support for a distinct counterterrorism policy. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
Negative climate change imagery is often criticised on the grounds that it provokes and promotes disempowering responses and psychological distancing. We investigated people's associations with climate change, and their affective content on multiple dimensions, through two studies. In Study 1, we administered an image-elicitation task to 2502 people across Australia to examine the mental images most commonly associated with climate change. We used these common responses from the image-elicitation task to compile 82 actual images. In Study 2, these images were presented to participants at a series of four workshops (N = 52). Participants selected the images they most closely associated with climate change, rated them for affective content on an emotion circumplex, and later discussed evocative images in small groups. The findings suggest (i) a significant proportion of people struggle to form concrete associations; (ii) common associations are typically psychologically distant and iconographic, but some national-level impacts are also salient; and (iii) associations with climate change impacts differ in their affective content: Specifically, associations related to drought and denuded landscapes provoke lower arousal, whereas associations related to disasters and extremes provoke higher arousal. The importance of considering motivated reasoning and multi-dimensional affect in the psychological distancing of climate change is discussed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Collective action against collective disadvantage is a theoretically and socially relevant phenomenon that has received increased scientific attention in recent years. Because recent work combines different theoretical traditions, the last decade can be rightly called an ‘age of integration’. In this article, I take stock and look ahead by briefly reviewing four core social‐psychological motivations for undertaking collective action (based on identity, morality, emotion, and efficacy). I then review recent accumulating evidence for an encompassing social‐psychological model of collective action that integrates all four core motivations. Based on this model's shortcomings, I close by calling for an ‘age of innovation’ for which I propose a theoretical and research agenda.
Many actors—including scientists, journalists, artists, and campaigning organizations—create visualizations of climate change. In doing so, they evoke climate change in particular ways, and make the issue meaningful in everyday discourse. While a diversity of climate change imagery exists, particular types of climate imagery appear to have gained dominance, promoting particular ways of knowing about climate change (and marginalizing others). This imagery, and public engagement with this imagery, helps to shape the cultural politics of climate change in important ways. This article critically reviews the nascent research area of the visual representations of climate change, and public engagement with visual imagery. It synthesizes a diverse body of research to explore visual representations and engagement across the news media, NGO communications, advertising, and marketing, climate science, art, and virtual reality systems. The discussion brings together three themes which occur throughout the review: time, truth, and power. The article concludes by suggesting fruitful directions for future research in the visual communication of climate change. WIREs Clim Change 2014, 5:73–87. doi: 10.1002/wcc.249 Conflict of interest: The authors have declared no conflicts of interest for this article. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.
A strong environmental self-identity increases the likelihood of a wide range of proenvironmental actions. But which factors influence identity and can we strengthen it? We propose that the environmental self-identity depends on biospheric values and on past behavior and that the strength of one’s environmental self-identity can be changed somewhat by reminding people of their past environmental behavior. We tested our model in a series of studies and show that biospheric values and past environmental behavior influence the environmental self-identity, which is in turn related to subsequent environmental judgments and intentions. Furthermore, we found that although the strength of the environmental self-identity changed when we reminded people of their past environmental actions, biospheric values remained an important predictor of self-identity, suggesting that the environmental self-identity has a stable core. Our results further suggest that environmental-friendly behavior can be promoted by reminding people of their past proenvironmental actions as this will strengthen one’s environmental self-identity.
Images act to draw in audiences through vivid and emotive portrayals, and in doing so, they facilitate both cognitive and affective processing. Yet images are not neutral – they can portray highly ideological messages, and act as normative statements portraying a particular way of viewing the world. Whilst climate imagery proliferates, media analysis of climate to date has focused almost exclusively on textual representations. Here, a two-part study was designed to explore climate change imagery in newspapers. First, a content analysis of visual images attached to online articles about climate change during 2010 from 13 US, UK and Australian newspapers, was undertaken. Analysis of the image concourse (n = 1603) shows broad patterns across all newspapers in the visualization of climate change, and sheds light on how multinational media ownership influences climate imagery portrayals. Second, a frame analysis was undertaken, by examining the composition and tone of particularly salient images in their cultural and political contexts. Together, these analyses indicate that two visual frames are prominent, a ‘contested’ visual frame and a ‘distancing’ visual frame; with Australian newspapers particularly relying on the ‘contested’ visual frame. These visual framings support particular interactions with the issue of climate change whilst marginalizing others, actively shaping the cultural politics of climate change in important ways.
A news report on an Appalachian tick disease was differently illustrated. It either contained no images, an image of ticks, or this tick image plus three child victims. The victims were ethnically balanced (two White, one Black) or not (either all White or all Black). The text did not make any reference to the victims' ethnicity. Respondents assessed the risk of contracting the disease for children of different ethnicity. Partiality in pictorially representing a particular ethnic group fostered the relative overestimation of risk for that group. Inclusion of the image of ticks, especially when combined with victim images, prompted higher risk assessment overall.
This study compared the effects of a photograph versus two artistic renditions of a beach scene contained in a direct-response print ad for a fictional Caribbean resort island. The two impressionistic artistic renditions included a watercolour painting based on the photograph and an electronically altered version of the photograph. Results indicate that the artistic renderings of the scene were superior to the photograph in drawing attention. The photograph was found to be better for evoking greater quantity, more vivid and more affectively positive mental imagery. The photograph was also superior in generating more favourable attitudes towards the ad and the resort and stronger behavioural intent, but not better recall of the resort name. Theoretical explanations and managerial implications are offered for this pattern of results.
Two studies provided support for the proposal that the role of norms in attitude-behavior relations can be usefully reconceptualized from the perspective of social identity/self-categorization theory. The first study revealed that the perceived norms of a behaviorally relevant reference group influenced intentions to engage in regular exercise, but only for subjects who identified strongly with the group, whereas the effect of perceived behavioral control (a personal factor) was strongest for low identifiers. Similarly, Study 2 revealed that the effect of group norms on females' intentions to engage in sun-protective behavior was evident only for high identifiers and that the effects of one of the personal variables (attitude) was stronger for low than for high identifiers. Additional results revealed that the perceived group norm predicted subjects' attitude, as did the perceived consequences of performing the behavior. The latter result was evident only for low identifiers.
