Promoting Pro-environmental Beliefs and Behaviour: Choose-Your-Own Story Futuristic Climate Game

PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0317773 March 31, 2025 1 / 18 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Muradova L, Beauvais E (2025) Promoting Pro-environmental Beliefs and Behaviour: Choose-Your-Own Story Futuristic Climate Game. PLoS ONE 20(3): e0317773. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0317773 Editor: Sergio A. Useche, University of Valencia: Universitat de Valencia, SPAIN Received: February 27, 2024 Accepted: January 3, 2025 Published: March 31, 2025 Copyright: © 2025 Muradova, Beauvais. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data availability statement: The data under- lying the results presented in the study are available from Harvard Dataverse (https://doi. org/10.7910/DVN/T8ZDZS). Funding: This study has been supported by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No 759736) awarded to SM, and the Social RESEARCH ARTICLE Promoting Pro-environmental Beliefs and Behaviour: Choose-Your-Own Story Futuristic Climate Game Lala Muradova 1*, Edana Beauvais2 1 Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom 2 Department of Political Science, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada * l.muradova@soton.ac.uk Abstract How can we address climate scepticism and increase public support for ambitious pro-

environmental policies? This study investigates the potential of future-oriented perspec- tive taking, using an innovative and futuristic choose-your-own-adventure narrative game. This cutting-edge intervention involves living in the life of a future self and making choices related to hypothetical climate crises. The choose-your-own-adventure game was inte- grated into online survey experiments in the United Kingdom (N = 1,738) and the United States (N = 1,290). We found that participation in the game elicited strong emotional responses in individuals, making them more empathetic, but also more hopeless and sad. Imagining their future self during the climate game enhanced people’s willingness to engage in future discussions about climate change among the UK respondents. Yet, the intervention did little to transform people’s pro-environmental beliefs, policy support, or willingness to sign a climate petition. Causal mediation analyses reveal that these null effects hide important direct and indirect effects. Empathic concern mediates significant positive indirect effect of climate game on people’s pro-environmental beliefs, but negative indirect effect on willingness to sign the climate petition. Empathy seems to shape envi- ronmental beliefs and behaviours in diverse ways, highlighting the complex and nuanced relationship between them. These findings offer important implications for recent research on the role of emotions in climate change communication, environmental psychology, and policymaking. We also present a unique approach to fostering empathy for the environ-

ment and future generations through an engaging choose-your-own-adventure game. Introduction Climate change represents the most pressing global challenge of the 21st century. Despite sci- entific consensus on the anthropogenic cause of climate change, a non-trivial segment of the world’s population still holds skeptical beliefs about climate change, opposes ambitious poli- cies to address climate change, and is reluctant to adopt pro-environmental behaviors [1–4]. How can we increase concern for the impacts of climate change, stimulate support for policies designed to address climate change, and motivate citizens’ political action on climate change? Research shows that pro-environmental policy preferences, and behaviours are influenced by