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 15 / 18 PLOS ONE Promoting Pro-environmental Beliefs and Behaviour Our findings have implications for the strand of literature on climate change commu- nication that advocates for more emotional interventions. We show that the choose-your- own-adventure game engages people’s emotions substantively, by making them much more empathetic, but also more fearful, angry and sad, among others. Moreover, the game has negative indirect effect on climate action, such as signing the climate petition. These contra- dictory effects of the climate game point to potential parallel causal mechanisms that underlie the relationship between perspective taking game and opinion and behaviour formation. The choose-your-own-adventure climate game exposed individuals to negative experiences – frightening and devastating climate disasters. All scenarios of the game have negative endings, irrespective of the choices players make. These scenarios may have induced higher levels of negative emotions in individuals. It is possible that hopelessness makes individuals feel that not much can be done in terms of policymaking on climate action. This corroborates the recent studies, showing that fearful representations of climate change can have backfire effects on individuals’ engagement with climate change [e.g., 18]. This finding also speaks to research that argues that in the absence of agency, empathy can lead to negative feelings of distress [36]. These results warrant a research agenda that explores more nuanced effects of emotions

on attitude formation about climate change. They also have implications for climate commu- nication policymaking. While exposing individuals to climate disasters may be more realistic, the emotional and behavioral consequences of such exposure could be negative. Therefore, care is needed in designing such interventions. We also contribute to larger political science scholarship that investigates the role of emo- tions in political cognition. A recent review suggests capturing emotions experienced simul- taneously in response to socio-political stimuli [38]. By measuring a range of emotions individuals experienced having played the climate game, we demonstrate that exposure to a treatment can elicit diverse emotional reactions in subjects. Capturing and controlling for these emotions is crucial to our understanding of how individuals engage with climate change and environmental information. Moreover, our study has implications for political communication on climate change. In the UK sample only, we find that playing the climate game increases respondents’ reported intention to talk about climate change in the future. Discussing climate change is one way of making it a salient issue for people’s lives and can motivate personal and collective action [39,40]. This study shows that playing this climate game can enhance people’s intention to talk about climate change. Limitations and future research One limitation of our current study is that all scenarios in our choose-your-own-adventure

climate game end negatively. As such, we only show the effects of future-oriented thinking and empathic concern on environmental beliefs, attitudes, and action in a series of negative scenar- ios. While this might be more “realistic” in the sense that climate change does and will produce a range of negative outcomes that no individual person has the power to stop by their own volition, future studies might consider how allowing participants to play the role of a hero who has the power to change the course of history in a fictional game can yield more positive results. Empowering participants to play a character who can produce positive scenarios in the face of climate disasters may have different effects on climate-related beliefs, attitudes, and actions. Another limitation of our present work is that we do not capture the causal mechanism by which the direct effect of playing the climate game reduces support for pro-climate policies and suppresses actions to address climate change. While we speculate that demobilization is caused by hopelessness, future studies should test this link with more sophisticated designs.