Speaker: Wojciech Malecki @Wojciech_Malecki
Affiliation: University of Wroclaw, Poland
Title: Psychological Proximity and the Influence of Climate Fiction on Climate Activism Intentions
Abstract (long version below): Empirical ecocriticism is an emerging field that combines insights from the environmental humanities with methods from environmental communication and the empirical study of literature in order to study the impact of environmental narratives in literature, film, television, video games, and other media on attitudes, emotions, perceptions, and behavior (Małecki, 2019; Schneider-Mayerson, Weik von Mossner, et al., 2020). While still relatively new, the field has already generated significant interest in academia and beyond, with special journal issues and edited collections devoted to it (Schneider-Mayerson et al., 2023), as well as media coverage by the likes of Newsweek or Psychology Today. This interest is mainly due to the exciting output generated by empirical ecocriticism on the potential of stories to move the public on today’s most pressing environmental issues such as animal welfare and climate change (Brereton & Gómez, 2020; Iossifidis & Garforth, 2022; Małecki et al., 2016, 2019; Malecki et al., 2021; Myren-Svelstad, 2023; Sabherwal & Shreedhar, 2022; Schneider-Mayerson, 2018; Schneider-Mayerson, Gustafson, et al., 2020). The panel presents new experimental evidence on that potential.
Long abstract
While cross-national studies consistently show that the global population is generally concerned or alarmed about climate change, most people are uncertain about the potential for humans to successfully reduce global warming and have low levels of confidence that humans will reduce global warming successfully (Goldberg et al., 2021; Leiserowitz et al., 2021; Verner et al., 2023). It is perhaps for this reason that they generally do not engage in political activism aimed at tackling climate change, nor have plans to increase their political engagement in any way (Goldberg et al., 2021). Activism and political engagement around climate change is critical because it is considered far more impactful than private or consumer choices (Maibach et al., 2020). Utopian climate fiction depicting successful efforts to address climate change involving a bottom-up political movement has the potential to stimulate climate action (Milkoreit, 2016; Milner & Burgmann, 2020; Thaler, 2022). But more often than not such climate fiction works depict events taking place in settings that are perceived by their target audience as foreign and distant in time (Milner & Burgmann, 2020), while research on Construal Level Theory indicates that an ”individual experiences a political issue” such as climate activism “on a continuum of psychological distance” such that if an issue is perceived as more distant temporally and geographically, it will be perceived as less important (Sparks, 2021; Trope & Liberman, 2010). In line with that theory, we will conduct an experimental study (N = ca. 475) to test whether the impact of utopian climate fiction on climate activism intentions will be greater for cli-fi stories with a setting perceived as nationally local and closer in time (10 years) than for stories with a setting perceived as foreign and further in time (50 years).
References
Goldberg, M. H., Wang, X., Marlon, J., Carman, J., Lacroix, K., Kotcher, J. E., Rosenthal, S. A., Maibach, E., & Leiserowitz, A. (2021, July 27). Segmenting the climate change Alarmed: Active, Willing, and Inactive. Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/segmenting-the-climate-change-alarmed-active-willing-and-inactive/
Leiserowitz, A., Carman, J., Buttermore, N., Wang, X., Rosenthal, S. A., & Marlon, J. R. (2021). International Public Opinion on Climate Change. Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/international-public-opinion-on-climate-change/
Maibach, E., Kotcher, J., Stenhouse, N., & Cook, J. (2020). Public Will, Activism and Climate Change. Frontiers Media SA.
Milkoreit, M. (2016). The promise of climate fiction: Imagination, storytelling, and the politics of the future. In Reimagining Climate Change. Routledge.
Milner, A., & Burgmann, J. R. (2020). Science Fiction and Climate Change: A Sociological Approach. Liverpool University Press.
Sparks, A. C. (2021). Climate Change in Your Backyard: When Climate is Proximate, People Become Activists. Frontiers in Political Science, 3. Frontiers | Climate Change in Your Backyard: When Climate is Proximate, People Become Activists
Thaler, M. (2022). No Other Planet: Utopian Visions for a Climate-Changed World. Cambridge University Press. No Other Planet
Trope, Y., & Liberman, N. (2010). Construal-level theory of psychological distance. Psychological Review, 117(2), 440–463. APA PsycNet
Verner, M., Marlon, J., Carman, J., Rosenthal, S. A., Ballew, M., Leiserowitz, A., Buttermore, N., & Mulcahy, K. (2023). Global Warming’s Six Audiences: A cross-national comparison. Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/global-warmings-six-audiences-a-cross-national-comparison/