Every summer is getting hotter. Wildfires are blazing, and the worst is yet to come. There’s nothing to be done – we’re doomed! Sound familiar?
This “climate doom” narrative can dominate the news cycle, particularly on social media, which is known to attract negativity. Climate doom can be a powerful argument for doing nothing. If people believe the climate crisis is already beyond repair, they may conclude that efforts to cut emissions or adapt to a changing world are pointless.
We should be wary of climate doom for two reasons. First, although the facts about climate change, heatwaves and wildfires are real, there’s still plenty to be done to reduce the consequences of climate change. Although some people use climate doom to spur action, it can have the opposite effect. Feelings of hopelessness and fear may cause people to switch off from the issue rather than act on it.
Second, fear-based terminology such as “climate apocalypse” may be perceived as manipulative, especially among right-leaning audiences who may consider this as a way to stir up panic.
In our recent study, we showed 521 participants, who were broadly reflective of the UK population, a simulated social media feed filled with climate doom headlines to better understand how manipulative they think it is and how it relates to climate action. We also explored the possibility of “inoculating” people against climate doom across the political spectrum.
We found that doom content is indeed perceived as more manipulative than other climate content, and the more manipulative people find doom content, the lower their pro-climate intentions. Fortunately, we were also able to “prebunk” climate doom by inoculating people against it beforehand.
Psychological inoculation
The standard approach to fighting misleading information is to debunk it afterwards. But research shows that fact-checking and debunking have limited efficacy because once exposed, misinformation tends to linger in people’s minds.
What if you could debunk false narratives in advance? Psychological inoculation is a theory that borrows its namesake from the medical analogy. The idea is that exposure to a weakened and refuted example of a misleading story can help develop “psychological antibodies” against manipulation in the future, just as medical vaccines generate resistance in the body against infection.
Inoculation has been shown to improve our ability to detect misinformation online, including climate change misinformation. In this study, we tested whether we could inoculate people against climate doom by demonstrating emotional manipulation in news headlines followed by a simple quiz to boost people’s defenses.
When people react to and share news online, it increases how quickly the content spreads and how many people see it. We thought that inoculation could also have knock-on effects on how people react to social media content, such as decreasing sharing of doom so others see less of it.
To address these questions, we ran an experiment online where half the participants watched an inoculation video against emotional manipulation and read a short piece of text on how this relates to climate change. The other half acted as a control and watched a video on how to draw a face. We then tested their understanding with a comprehension question.
Everyone was subsequently exposed to the simulated social media feed below, where they scrolled through a handful of climate doom headlines, non-doom climate headlines and completely unrelated headlines so we could capture their reactions (such as sharing, liking, disliking) to doom content.
Afterwards, participants rated how manipulative they thought each climate headline was, and reported how often they intend to take steps to reduce their carbon footprint – such as adhering to a vegan diet – on a five-point scale ranging from never to always.
We found that people viewed doom content as more manipulative than non-doom content and that inoculation significantly improved people’s ability to discern climate doom from regular climate content across the political spectrum. Although it’s possible that inoculation may make people more skeptical of climate headlines in general, this did not happen. Instead, it gave people better skills.
Inoculated participants were also more likely to dislike and flag doom content and less likely to share it, suggesting that inoculation increases critical engagement with doom and could reduce the dissemination of doom-laden content.
Doom and climate action
Higher perceived manipulation of doom content predicted that people would be less likely to adopt eco-friendly actions. So the more manipulative you find climate doom the less likely you would be to avoid long-haul flights, for example.
So what should we do instead? Communicators can focus more on solution-focused journalism and, when aiming to reach more climate-sceptic audiences, avoid using doom as a mobilization tactic.
Climate change is one of the biggest threats humanity faces, but we need to do more to guard against climate doom. Our research shows that one way to do this is by empowering people to identify climate doom in the first place.
By Sander van der Linden, Professor of Social Psychology in Society, University of Cambridge and Rachel O'Boyle, PhD Candidate, Social Decision-Making Lab, Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge; Academia Sinica. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
