Should We Hope About Climate Change? The Power of Hope for Engaging in Pro-environmental Behaviors: An Abstract

Abstract

“Demain” is a French documentary film launched in 2015 by Mélanie Laurent and Cyril Dion which presents many feel-good stories of people that are taking concrete actions to combat the ecological crisis. In contrast to most environmental campaigns, the filmmakers decided to use positive emotions instead of negative emotions to encourage people to adopt behaviors in favor of the environment. Surprisingly, this innovative approach has received limited attention in the literature. This paper aims to fill this gap in investigating the role of hope about climate change (hope) on adoption of pro-environmental behaviors. Two studies looked at the distinct effect of feeling hope on the commitment of the population to a big range of pro-environmental behaviors. In the first study, we measured the level of hope of a sample of 202 Mechanical Turk respondents and evaluated its correlation with the level of pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors. We controlled for dispositional hope and optimism in order to have a clear picture of the main and isolated impact of hope. We found that hope was significantly, positively correlated to pro-environmental behaviors and attitude toward the environment. Dispositional hope did not impact this relationship, and optimism about climate change did not have any statistically significant correlation to pro-environmental behaviors. Knowledge regarding climate change influenced hope in such a way that an increase of knowledge was beneficial to hope until a certain level and detrimental after. In the second study (N = 229), to insure the causal effect of hope on pro-environmental behaviors, we used a writing task to manipulate the level of hope among respondents. The first group was asked to write down the reasons why we can be hopeful about climate change (hope condition; n = 70), the second the reasons why we cannot be hopeful (absence of hope condition; n = 78), and the third (control condition; n = 81) was asked to write down what they think about climate change. We then measured their intention to engage in various environmental behaviors in the next year. Results supported the outcomes of study 1. Hope was positively related to intention to engage in pro-environmental behaviors. To conclude, hope appeals should be used in awareness-raising campaigns to increase consumers’ engagement in pro-environmental behaviors and to reduce denial and counter effects of educative messages about climate change effects.