Selling Climate Change: Developing a Model of Climate Change Communication That Accounts for Persuasive Messages

• In Event: ICA Plenary Interactive Paper/Poster Session and Reception
  In Interactive Paper Session: Environmental Communication Interactive Poster Session

Abstract

Climate change represents a serious threat and mass media are deemed central to the public’s understandings of and attitudes toward climate change. Efforts to bring about public consensus on the issue have focused on informative media, largely ignoring persuasive communication, like advertising. This conceptually oriented paper seeks to bring strategic content more fully into the picture and develops a process-oriented model that outlines not only how strategic messages might be effective communication tools but how these messages are interpreted and processed depending on individual predispositions and orientations. Drawing on cultivation theory, social cognitive theory and framing theory, this manuscript proposes a model of persuasive environmental communication that is informed by the O-S-O-R perspective of social psychology and political communication to outline the potential salutary role of strategic messages in climate change communication and the ways in which it represents opportunities to educate and engage lay audiences.

Author

• Lucy Atkinson, University of Texas at Austin