The impact of place and legacy framing on climate action: A lifespan approach

RESEARCH ARTICLE The impact of place and legacy framing on climate action: A lifespan approach Robert H. WickershamID1*, Lisa Zaval2, Nancy A. Pachana3, Michael A. Smyer4 1 Department of Psychology, University of Colorado Colorado Springs, Colorado Springs, Colorado, United States of America, 2 Department of Psychology, Columbia University, New York, New York, United States of America, 3 School of Psychology, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, 4 Department of Psychology, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, United States of America * rwickers@uccs.edu Abstract Despite several decades of research on more effectively communicating climate change to the general public, there is only limited knowledge about how older adults engage with an issue that will shape and define future generations. We focus on two key factors that may motivate younger and older adults to engage in climate change action, legacy concern and place attachment, and assess whether older adults differ in any appreciable way from the general population in this domain. We randomly exposed participants of different ages to either a Legacy, Place, or control writing induction task before they completed various self- report measures. Both induction conditions were associated with significantly greater pro- environmental behavioral intentions and donations for all age groups when compared to the control condition. Legacy motivation and biophilia were used as manipulation checks and found to partially mediate these effects. Findings suggest that legacy and place message

framing may be useful in prompting adults of all ages to take action to help combat climate change. Introduction Climate change is real [1,2] and accelerating in its pace and impacts [3,4]. The health and eco- nomic impacts of climate change are documented [2,5] with older adults highlighted as a potentially vulnerable group. However, critical psychological barriers to citizen engagement and participation in combating climate change remain [6]. Communication research has explored how subtle behavioral interventions and messaging frames can both increase citizen engagement in climate change issues and encourage pro-envi- ronmental behaviors. For example, highlighting local impacts of climate change makes the benefits of acting to mitigate climate change more tangible, leading people to act more sustain- ably [7]. Another effective strategy is to reduce temporal and psychological distance from the issue by framing climate change as an immediate threat, rather than a remote problem [8]. Messages and intervention strategies targeted to the intrinsic values of a specific audience may be most effective in motivating action [9]. However, one potentially important question has received less attention in the framing literature: how do older adults engage with the issue of climate change? PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0228963 February 25, 2020 1 / 17 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Wickersham RH, Zaval L, Pachana NA, Smyer MA (2020) The impact of place and legacy framing on climate action: A lifespan approach.

PLoS ONE 15(2): e0228963. https://doi.org/ 10.1371/journal.pone.0228963 Editor: Valerio Capraro, Middlesex University, UNITED KINGDOM Received: June 16, 2019 Accepted: January 27, 2020 Published: February 25, 2020 Copyright: © 2020 Wickersham et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All data files are available from the Open Science Framework database (accession numbers DOI 10.17605/OSF. IO/JVXCN, https://osf.io/jvxcn/). Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.