Can Fiction Make the Climate Crisis Real?

• In Event: Shaping Climate Change Beliefs: Messaging and Measurement

Abstract

Can fiction make the climate crisis real? Globally, low levels of climate awareness, belief, and concern suggests that existing strategies to change opinions and behavior around climate change remain relatively ineffective (Leiserowitz et al. 2022). In this paper, we examine a new strategy for inducing climate awareness building on work in psychology and political science that uses narrative strategies to shape attitudes and behavior. This approach, called perspective-getting, can change opinions on a range of subjects from immigration and refugee acceptance to LGBTQ rights (Eyal et al 2018, Kalla and Broockman 2021, Adida et al 2022). We design a narrative treatment that goes beyond the standard perspective-getting approach, using fictional narratives to both convey information and evoke emotion, which can affect information processing and information-seeking behavior. In a large cross-country online experiment, we randomly expose respondents to a purse control condition, to a factual scientific framing of climate information, and to a fictional narrative containing the same information to test the effectiveness of fictional climate narratives in improving climate literacy.

Authors

• Melina Raquel Platas Izama, NYU Abu Dhabi

• Andy Andrew Harris, New York University Abu Dhabi