More than scientists: How message and messenger attributes influence viewers’ climate change intentions

PLOS One | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0331672 September 10, 2025 3 / 20 and evaluating their impact on audience responses. Positive attitudinal and behavioral shifts toward climate change mitigation have been observed in audiences following exposure to certain frames, such as presenting climate change impacts as local rather than global [14] or as a threat to public health [15]; or presenting mitigation in terms of gains rather than losses [16] along with objective information on climate change and mitigation behaviours [17]; or in ways that arouse positive emotions [18,19]. For instance, Morton et al. [20] found that high uncertainty messages framed to emphasize neg- ative outcomes decreased participants’ intentions to engage in pro-environmental behavior, whereas the same uncertainty messages produced higher levels of collective efficacy and stronger intentions to act when combined with positive mes- sage frames (highlighting avoidance of losses due to climate change). In addition, several studies found guilt framing can be effective in conveying marine conservation messages [21], especially when supplemented with solution frames [22,23]. Effects of climate change message frames may vary according to individual characteristics of recipients, such as their political orientation. Previous research indicates that individuals with liberal (left wing) political views tend to be more con- cerned about climate change, view it as more threatening, and express greater willingness to perform mitigative behaviors

and support climate policies than conservative (right wing) individuals [24]. Accordingly, several climate change message frames have increased concern and engagement among liberal recipients but elicited either no change or a backlash among conservatives [14,25]. For example, Feldman and Hart [25] presented participants with online news stories that framed climate change in six different ways (highlighting conflict, economics, environmental impacts, morality, national security, or public health). They found that the public health frame influenced subsequent self-selected exposure to climate change news stories among adults with liberal to moderate political views, but the frame had no effect on partici- pants with conservative political views. Strategic framing can also minimize message rejection by conservatives. A series of studies by Baldwin and Lammers [26] found that Liberals tended to indicate strong intentions to act against climate change in response to both past- and future-focused frames, but only past-focused messages convinced conservatives to take action. Feinberg and Willer [27] found that conservatives who were exposed to a sanctity/purity frame (e.g., depicting pollution) reported greater belief in climate change, pro-environmental attitudes, and support for policies than did conservatives exposed to a harm/ care frame (e.g., emphasizing harm to nature caused by humans). Wolsko et al. [28] found that exposure to a frame that emphasized sanctity, loyalty, and obeying authority moderated the effect of political orientation on conservation inten-

tions, climate-change attitudes, and charitable environmental donations, such that conservatives reported similar levels to liberals. The power of words Frames can be identified by analyzing linguistic properties of a message. For example, Linguistic analyses have revealed that climate change communications involve explicit and hidden voices that represent various actors and draw upon multiple and divergent frames [29,30]. In this way, choice of language (i.e., linguistic framing) may be viewed as a process that manifests a conscious or subconscious emphasis by the text producer [29] and can reveal their underlying cognitive frames [31]. Linguistic approaches to analyzing climate change communication often use software programs, such as Lin- guistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC; [32]), which calculates frequencies of words and word stems that belong to catego- ries that reflect social, cognitive, and affective processes. Several studies have applied linguistic analysis to reveal climate change related attitudes, emotions, and motivations in text corpuses drawn from various sources and populations. Veltri and Atanasova [33] found that English-speaking Twitter (X) users tend to focus on the issue of causation and that emotional tweets are mainly characterized by anger and sad- ness, while Shapiro and Park [34] found that individuals who post comments about global warming videos on YouTube tend to politicize the issue. Medimorec and Pennycook [35] compared the language of two reports authored by agencies

with opposing views on anthropogenic climate change—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [36] and the skeptical Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change [37]. Although both reports reviewed the physical