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 16 / 18 PLOS ONE Promoting Pro-environmental Beliefs and Behaviour Concluding thoughts Despite the shortcomings, our results show that absent the indirect, mediating effect of empathy, potential negative experiences of having been exposed to climate crises may leave individuals feeling hopeless and overwhelmed. Like in our game, climate change is causing a series of disasters resulting in negative outcomes for millions of people. These negative experiences directly increase the belief that climate change is happening. However, in the absence of empathic concern for future generations, these overwhelming negative experiences may reduce support for pro-climate policies. To mitigate and cancel out this demobiliza- tion, policymakers should harness the power of future-oriented thinking to indirectly boost pro-climate attitudes and action by increasing empathic concern for future generations. While the net effect of inducing empathic concern from playing a future-oriented game was not enough to fully overcome the direct consequences of suffering a series of climate disasters in our game, in some cases it is able to cancel out the demobilizing effects of the overwhelmingly negative consequences of climate change. Lastly, with this study we provide a blueprint for eliciting empathy in individuals towards the environment using a first-person, choose-you-own-adventure game. This is an online, low-cost, and scalable intervention that is entertaining and easier to introduce in real-world.

The game holds significant practical value, especially in the field of environmental education and activism and could also influence the development of other social marketing strategies and initiatives. Supporting Information S1 Fig. Example Scenarios for the Climate Game – UK (word) S1 Table. Descriptive Sample Statistics (UK) (word) S2 Table. Descriptive Sample Statistics (US) (word) S3 Table. Variable Means and Standard Deviations (UK) (word) S4 Table. Variable Means and Standard Deviations (US) (word) S5 Table. Full Models (UK) (word) S6 Table. Full Models (US) (word) S1 File. List of deviations from the pre-registration (Word) Acknowledgments We are grateful for helpful comments on this manuscript provided by audiences at the American Political Science Association Conference (2021), Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) workshop, Amsterdam, Netherlands organized by the Hot Poli- tics Lab at the University of Amsterdam (May 2022), the Departmental Seminars of the