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 9 / 18 PLOS ONE Promoting Pro-environmental Beliefs and Behaviour Furthermore, using the difference-in-means to recover the average treatment effect (ATE), we find that the choose-your-own-story climate game elicited more empathic concern (MD = 0.26; SE = 0.01; two-tailed p < 0.01) in individuals (Fig 5). As Fig 5 shows, playing the game also increased sadness, helplessness, grief, guilt, anxiety, anger and disgust, while reducing indifference, surprise and happiness. In other words, the choose-your-own-adventure climate game emotionally engaged respondents, evoking a range of negative emotions alongside fostering increased empathy. To investigate our first set of hypotheses, i.e., the effects of playing the climate game on pro-environmental beliefs, policy support and action, we conducted simple OLS regression analyses. The full results of the regression models are reported in Table 3. Contrary to our expectations, we find that playing the climate change game did not directly increase people’s belief that the world’s climate is changing due to increases in temperature over the past 100 years. Neither did it directly increase the public belief that climate change is caused by human activity, nor did it increase the belief that climate change will harm them personally or harm future generations. Paired t-test shows that playing the climate game had no within-subject effect on the belief that climate change will harm the future generations. We also found no

direct effect of playing the climate game on support for climate policies, such as support for increasing taxes on fossil fuels, using public money to subsidise renewable energy, or the law banning the sale of the least energy efficient household appliances. Lastly, we found no direct effect of playing the game on pro-environmental behaviour, including willingness to sign a petition and willingness to talk about climate change in the future. Fig 5. Mean differences in experienced emotions, by treatment condition (Study 1). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0317773.g005