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

concern for their legacy should promote pro-environmental action, since seniors may be par- ticularly motivated to leave a positive legacy and take responsibility for future generations. Interventions and message frames designed to increase legacy motives may therefore be partic- ularly powerful among older adults. Since older adults have higher levels of legacy concern and place attachment, leveraging these psychological motives could serve as effective intervention strategies to promote environ- mental behavior among older adults. The current study assesses the impact of two motiva- tional strategies—an induction designed to increase legacy motivation and an induction designed to enhance place attachment—on pro-environmental behavioral intent and behavior (donations to an environmental charity). Specifically, this study has three goals: (1) to replicate and expand upon the findings of an earlier study on the impact of legacy motives on pro-envi- ronmental behaviors [26] by exploring whether legacy motivations can be leveraged among an older adult sample; (2) to provide initial information on the impact of a place-based induction [27] on climate change behaviors across the lifespan; and (3) to assess the mediating impacts of individual differences on variables linked to aging and sustainability behaviors. Within this context, we have three hypotheses: 1. That the Legacy induction will be positively associated with pro-environmental behavioral intentions and pro-environmental behavior;

2. That the Place induction will be positively associated with pro-environmental behavioral intentions and pro-environmental behavior; 3. That older adults exposed to the Legacy and Place inductions will experience greater posi- tive associations with pro-environmental intentions and behaviors than younger adults. Materials and methods Participants A diverse sample of 1005 American participants were recruited and completed our study between 12/7/16 and 12/27/16 using the advanced sampling procedures available through Amazon’s TurkPrime (an enhanced version of Amazon’s mTurk) to achieve an even distribu- tion across ages in the sample, ranging from 18–87. Specifically, TurkPrime’s HyperBatch, IP tracking, and age-based quota features were used to simultaneously recruit 5 groups of 200 American adults from the following age groups: 18–30, 31–40, 41–50, 51–60, and 61+ (64–87). Online experiment services like mTurk have numerous advantages and have been found to be at least as valid as traditional recruitment methods [28]. All participants were given the oppor- tunity to review study details and informed consent information via mTurk before electing to participate in the experiment and following a hyperlink to begin our online survey, which was hosted by Qualtrics. This experiment was approved by the University of Colorado Colorado Springs Institutional Review Board. Five attention checks were used as quality control measures and were included in the exper- imental design, with an a priori cutoff of missing three or more attention checks, or blatantly

not following instructions, set as the criteria for exclusion from analysis. One attention check gave lengthy instructions but asked participants to simply write “I read the instructions” and to ignore the multiple choice options presented on the page. Other attention checks involved assessing timestamps and screening for nonsensical responses on the writing task to see if par- ticipants complied with instructions, or simply clicked through the experiment as quickly as possible. Based on these criteria, 17 participants were excluded from analysis, leaving a remaining total sample of 988. Because this study was able to achieve an even distribution of Impact of framing on climate action PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0228963 February 25, 2020 3 / 17