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 10 / 18 PLOS ONE Promoting Pro-environmental Beliefs and Behaviour For robustness, we rerun these bivariate models using OLS regression, controlling for a set of covariates. The results of these models remain robust and are reported in S5 Table. Further, we examined the within-subject changes in individual’s willingness to engage in conversation about climate change in the future. Willingness to engage in conversations about climate change was measured at the start of the survey (prior to providing respon- dents with information about climate change and before playing the game) and again at the end of the survey. We see that playing both the placebo and climate game increases people’s self-reported intention to discuss climate change in the future. This effect is likely due to the baseline information about climate change that was provided to all respondents in the study. However, the observed change in willingness to discuss climate change is greater in the climate game condition than in the placebo (MD = 0.05, SE = 0.04; p < 0.10 statistical signifi- cance level). Causal mediation analyses models To examine the indirect effects of playing the climate change game on pro-environmental beliefs, policy support and behaviour, we conducted causal mediation analyses [34], taking the experienced “empathic concern” as a mediator and running the analyses separately for each set of dependent variables (Fig 6). For this purpose, we have created two index variables.

The first sums three belief variables, whereas the second sums support for three different policy preferences. Discussion and petition were treated as separate variables. As the graph shows (top-left), the climate game has a positive and statistically significant indirect effect on pro-environmental beliefs (ACME: 0.52, CI: [0.40–0.65]; p < 0.001), that passes via the experi- enced empathetic concern. Disentangling the total effect into direct and indirect effects reveals that climate game exerts a significant negative direct effect on pro-environmental beliefs (β= − 0.57, CI: [−0.80 to − 0.32]). The negative direct effect and the positive indirect effect cancel each other, leading to a null total effect. Playing the future-oriented, climate-change game has mixed effects on policy attitudes (Fig 6, top right triangle). The direct effect of playing the game on pro-climate policy attitudes is positive, albeit not substantive (direct effect: 0.07, CI: [0.04 to 0.10]). And there is no evidence that empathy indirectly mediates the effect of playing the game on policy attitudes (ACME: − 0.06, CI: [−0.07 to 0.04]). Similar patterns are observed for the direct effect of playing the climate game on pro- climate action (Fig 6, bottom left triangle). Playing the game increases respondents’ willingness to sign a petition (direct effect: 0.14, CI: [0.09 to 0.19]), but those who feel empathic concern as a result of playing the game are less willing to sign it (ACME: − 0.13, CI: [−0.16 to − 0.10]).

Table 3. The effects of climate game on pro-environmental beliefs, policy support and action. M1 M2 M3 M4 M5 M6 M7 M8 M9 Climate Game −0.02 −0.01 0.07 −0.02 0.03 0.03 0.06 0.06 0.01 (0.04) (0.03) (0.05) (0.05) (0.06) (0.05) (0.06) (0.06) (0.02) _cons 4.31*** 3.31*** 2.76*** 3.96*** 2.50*** 2.08*** 2.22*** 2.86*** 1.48*** (0.03) (0.03) (0.04) (0.04) (0.04) (0.04) (0.04) (0.04) (0.02) Sample N 1738 1738 1738 1738 1659 1675 1674 1738 1738 Notes: M1: climate is changing; M2: human causes of climate change; M3: climate change will harm self; M4: climate change will harm future generations; M5: support for taxes on fossil fuels; M6: subsidising renewables; M7: banning the sale of the least energy appliances; M8: discussing climate change; M9: signing a climate petition. Standard errors in parentheses. * p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0317773.t003