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 4 / 18 PLOS ONE Promoting Pro-environmental Beliefs and Behaviour minority in Hungary). It is a text-based narrative game (see Fig 3 and S1 Fig for an example). Respondents who were randomly assigned to play the climate game were told that they would experience life as their future self, in the year 2121 (UK), or year 2122 (US), and are asked in which region in the UK/which state in the US they would like to start the game. After making a series of choices within the first relevant climate-risk module (conditional on their region/state choice), respondents were given the option to “move to another region of the UK/another state in the US” or else, eventually reaching a “game over,” at which time they “started over in another region”, and were randomly assigned to the next climate risk module. All participants in the treatment condition played their way through every climate-risk mod- ule (restarting their lives in different UK/US regions), regardless of where they start the game. Individuals played the full choose-your-own-adventure narrative game only once. The game lasted approximately 17–20 minutes. Ethics statement The experimental procedure, and the surveys were approved by the Research Ethics Boards (REB) of the University of Leuven (KU Leuven), and Simon Fraser University (Canada). All participants provided written informed consent and were compensated for their participa- tion. The studies were preregistered at aspredicted.org/tm56-5wsr.pdf; with the amendments

being preregistered at https://aspredicted.org/mrgq-7jh9.pdf, and aspredicted.org/ytnr-mrkg. pdf. All replication materials (data and codes) are available at HarvardDataVerse https://doi. org/10.7910/DVN/T8ZDZS. See S1 File for the list of deviations from the preregistration plan. Study design The choose-your-own-adventure intervention was embedded in a survey taken by individuals online at their convenience (Fig 4). We designed and fielded two nationally representative Table 1. Regions/states and the related climate crisis modules. Region/State Climate Risk UK Midlands (East or West); or Southwest of England; or Northern Ireland Drought Module East of England, or Wales Erosion Module Northwest England or Southeast Fire Module London Famine (Food Scarcity) Module Scotland, or Northeast, or Yorkshire, and Humberside Flooding Module US Kansas, Nebraska, Kentucky, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah, Wyoming. Drought Module Alabama, Alaska, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Loui- siana, Maryland, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia. Erosion Module Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Ore- gon, and Washington. Fire Module Connecticut, District of Columbia (DC), Massachu- setts, and Rhode Island. Famine (Food Scarcity) Module Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Main, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. Flooding Module https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0317773.t001