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 8 / 18 PLOS ONE Promoting Pro-environmental Beliefs and Behaviour of the emotions they experienced. Self-reported experienced emotions were captured with a battery item (see Table 2), which included fifteen emotion words in the UK sample, and eleven emotion words in the US sample (sympathy, empathy, concern, compassion, fear, sadness, anger, happiness, worry, guilt and helplessness). In this study, we are primarily interested in empathic concern. Consistent with the previous literature [e.g., 23], we measure empathic concern with several empathy adjectives. Respondents were asked to indicate the extent to which they felt sympathetic, empathic, concerned, and moved when participating in the game. All four items in the battery loaded well in one factor, with high internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.90). The items were summed to form an index measure, and the index was further rescaled to 0–1 to facilitate the interpretation and comparison of effects. Manipulation check. To examine whether the treatment was taken correctly by respondents in our sample, after the game, we asked respondents the following question: “Please indicate the extent to which you agree with the following statement: ‘when playing the choose-your-own adventure game, I imagined how my future self would feel and think’, with response categories being (1) strongly disagree, (2) disagree, (3) neither disagree nor agree, (4) agree, and (5) strongly agree.”

Analysis plan. To investigate our research questions, and test the effects of our climate intervention, we conducted difference-in-means t-tests and OLS regression analyses. The main models reported in this paper are bivariate. For robustness, we rerun the models controlling for a set of pre-treatment covariates, specifically: age, gender, education, race, political party identity, and political ideology (left-right spectrum). To capture within-subject changes in intention to discuss climate change in the future, one of our behaviour measures, we run a paired sample t-test by treatment conditions. Lastly, to investigate the mediating effects of empathic concern on pro-environmental beliefs, policy support and climate action, we conducted causal mediation analyses [34]. For these analyses, we create two index variables by summing items that measure climate change beliefs and pro-environmental policy preferences. We analysed two pro- environmental behaviour measures (signing a petition and intention to discuss climate change) separately. Results Study 1 (UK) Our manipulation check shows that respondents in the climate game were more likely to imagine their future (M = 3.85; SD = 0.93), than those in the placebo game condition (M = 3.26; SD = 1.10) and the difference (MD = 0.59; SD = 0.05) is statistically significant at two-tailed p < 0.01 significance level. Expressed in percentages, 72.4% of respondents in the treatment condition reported that they imagined their future self as opposed to only 49% of respondents

in the placebo condition. This gives us an indication that the majority of respondents in the experimental treatment engaged in perspective taking. Going forward, how often do you intend to discuss climate change with others? Reverse coded to mean: 1 Not at all 2 A little 3 A moderate amount 4 A lot 5 A great deal https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0317773.t002 Table 2. (Continued)