Compassion for climate change victims and support for mitigation policy

The lack of broad public support for climate change mitigation policy hampers efforts to adopt timely approaches to the climate crisis. Echoing prior calls for examining the role of emotions in climate change communication, this study explores effects of compassion on support for government actions to address climate change. A diverse sample of U.S. participants (N 1⁄4 400) was randomly assigned to different message treatments as part of a 2 (compassion: high or low) 2 (climate change cue: present or absent) between-subjects factorial design. Results showed that the high-compassion condition elicited greater self-reported compassion and stronger belief that a climate-related humanitarian crisis was caused by human activities, both of which, in turn, mediated increased policy supportdparticularly among political conservatives and moderates (compared to liberals). Overall, these findings add to the nascent literature examining emotions in climate change public opinion and help inform compassion appeals in climate change communication. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Despite increasing evidence that climate change is primarily caused by human activities and is already producing severe negative impacts, the American public's concern about climate change has remained relatively stable in recent years (Leiserowitz, Maibach, Roser-Renouf, Feinberg, & Rosenthal, 2015) and climate change continues to emerge near the bottom of the public's policy priorities for the President and Congress (Pew, 2015a). Because the preferences and demands of citizens play a crucial and foundational role in the government policy agenda, timely and effective actions to mitigate and/or adapt to climate change will likely require broad public support for building political will (Bliuc et al., 2015). However, the persistent partisan divide on the climate issue (e.g., McCright & Dunlap, 2011; Pew, 2015b) threatens to undermine policy initiatives that the world's leading scientists believe will be critical if humanity is to avert the most severe warming projections and their negative impacts (Drews & van den Bergh, 2015). Due in part to the disconnect between the beliefs of scientists and the public on this issue, understanding how message features influence public support for climate policy has emerged as a major focus for research in environmental communication (Drews & van @cornell.edu (J.P. Schuldt). den Bergh, 2015). Some have suggested that the lack of widespread public support on climate policy may be due, in part, to ineffective communication efforts that fail to engage and resonate with individuals of diverse backgrounds (e.g., political ideologies, cultural worldviews; Newell & Pitman, 2010; Kahan, Jenkins-Smith, & Braman, 2011; Pearson & Schuldt, 2014). Efforts to enhance climate change communication usually concentrate on cognitive framing aspects related to the development of a persuasive message (e.g., Nisbet, Hart, Myers, & Ellithorpe, 2013; Schuldt, Konrath, & Schwarz, 2011; Wiest, Raymond, & Clawson, 2015). Recently, research has begun to explore the role of emotions, a powerful motivator for human behaviors, in influencing how individuals process and react to climate change information (e.g., Chadwick, 2015; Lu & Schuldt, 2015). Building on this emerging literature as well as research on political ideology and climate change communication, the present study investigates how compassionda positive emotion that is frequently featured in narratives about the negative impacts of climate change for human beingsd influences individuals' support for government actions to address climate change and how it may interact with individuals' political ideology. 1. Emotions and climate change communication Barriers to establishing effective climate change communication H. Lu, J.P. Schuldt / Journal of Environmental Psychology 45 (2016) 192e200 193 have been well documented (Markowitz & Shariff, 2012; Moser, 2010; Van der Linden, Maibach, & Leiserowitz, 2015). Among them are the perception that climate change is a distant issue and the fact that different segments of the public have divergent opinions regarding its existence and origins (Bliuc et al., 2015; Spence, Poortinga, & Pidgeon, 2012). Researchers have sought to address these communication barriers by examining how different ways of framing the causes and impacts of climate change (e.g., attribution of responsibility, social distance, etc.) can shape individuals' attitudes and behaviors (e.g., Hart & Nisbet, 2012; Jang, 2013). These efforts have led to promising but also mixed results. While emotional appeals are often conceptualized as a particular type of framing and frequently promoted as an efficacious strategy for persuasion (Dillard & Nabi, 2006; Nabi, 2003), few studies have directly explored their potential in communicating climate change; however, accumulating evidence suggests that emotions may play an unappreciated role in this domain. First, in relation to the climate-change-as-distant issue, literature in cognitive psychology has shown that increased emotional intensity of an event/object can reduce its perceived distance (Cole, Balcetis, & Dunning, 2013; Van Boven, Kane, McGraw,& Dale, 2010). Second, with regards to the deep-seated political polarization on climate change, previous psychology and communication research suggests that emotions can affect policy preferences that are typically strongly linked to political ideology (Kühne& Schemer, 2015; Small & Lerner, 2008). Although many of these studies investigated effects of emotions rather than emotional appeals per se, we examined whether emotions induced through an emotional appeal may have similar effects. Most relevant to this research are a small but growing number of studies linking emotions to climate change policy support. In an early study investigating factors accounting for the American public's support for climate policy, affective responses to climate change emerged as a strong predictor (Leiserowitz, 2006). A more recent study extended this work and found that discrete emotions such as worry, interest, and hope explained more variance in climate policy preferences than did a wide range of socio-demographic variables, including political ideology and cultural worldviews (Smith & Leiserowitz, 2014). Apart from these cross-sectional survey studies, emotions elicited in randomized controlled experiments have also been shown to influence support for climate policy, suggesting a causal role of emotions in the processing of climate information. For instance, Lu and Schuldt (2015) explored how incidental emotions might influence the way that audiences reacted to climate change information. Results revealed that climate policy preferences were contingent on the particular emotion (namely, guilt or anger) that people were induced to feel before making the decisiondin addition to other factors including political partisanship and the framed social distance of climate change impacts. Taken together, while relatively little is known regarding the role played by discrete emotionsdand by extension, persuasive messaging that utilizes emotional appealsdin climate policy support, the current literature hints at the possible strengths of this particular framing strategy. 1.1. Compassion and motivation Existing climate change communication campaigns have predominantly featured information that is likely to induce negative emotions, such as fear, guilt, and shame (Markowitz & Shariff, 2012). However, research has shown that overly dire messages about the consequences of climate change can potentially backfire, by increasing skepticism concerning the existence of climate change (Feinberg & Willer, 2011). This finding is consistent with research in other domains indicating that negative emotional appeals can sometimes elicit unintended consequences (Nabi, 2015; Williams, 2011). Thus, scholars are increasingly advocating more attention to positively valenced emotions (e.g., Markowitz & Shariff, 2012), and in this vein, Chadwick (2015) found evidence that hope appeals can increase the perceived effectiveness (e.g., whether the message is convincing) of climate change messages. While it has received less attention than other emotions (notably, fear) as an influence tool in the persuasion literature, the positive emotion of compassion is especially relevant to the context of climate change communication. In this paper, we follow discrete emotion theories and adopt the view that compassion is an emotion elicited from witnessing another's suffering that subsequently generates a desire within the perceiver to help alleviate that suffering (DeSteno, 2015; Goetz, Keltner, & Simon-Thomas, 2010). Because of its approach tendency, compassion has the potential to enhance social engagement with others and reduce psychological distance (Oveis, Horberg, & Keltner, 2010), the latter of which may be essential for reducing the public's tendency to construe climate change in psychologically distant terms (Weber, 2010). More importantly, compassion is a prosocial emotion that is linked to increased care and concern for others, decreased attention to one's own needs, and a motivation to aid another person for their own sake (Goetz et al., 2010). Numerous studies have indeed shown that the experience of compassion stimulates helping behaviors even at a personal cost to the helper (e.g., Condon & DeSteno, 2011; Leiberg, Klimecki, & Singer, 2011). This prosocial feature of compassion is readily applicable to climate change communication because in order to mitigate negative effects of climate change, individuals need to bewilling to make personal sacrifices for the sake of others (e.g., other species, people in other countries, future generations, etc.). These “others” are oftentimes depicted as victims of climate change, which will likely induce compassion among the audiences who encounter such information. While empirical studies of climate change message effects abound, compassion has rarely been the primary focus in this line of research; it is therefore unknown whether compassion can exert beneficial effects in climate change communication. In particular, because we are interested in the implications of compassion appeals for climate change communication, our study does not examine measures that can help the suffering victims directlydfor instance, intentions to donate. Instead, we focus on measures that can help prevent the future occurrence of similar tragedies, namely, support for government actions aimed at mitigating climate change. In so doing, we also explore whether effects of compassion can extend beyond the provision of immediate help to shape support for societal-level interventions that, ultimately, would reduce the likelihood of similar tragedies in the future. Importantly, beyond examining the potential for main effects of compassion on climate-related policy preferences, we also seek to examine the underlying mechanism for the hypothesized effect. We suggest three factors that may serve as mediators of compassion effects in the present context. The first one is the subjective feeling of compassion. If claims are to be made about the effects of compassion appeals on policy support, subjective feelings of compassion should serve as the mediator between the appeal and the outcome such that any effect on policy support is contingent on the extent to which the compassion appeal evoked the target emotion among audience members. The second factor is perceived H. Lu, J.P. Schuldt / Journal of Environmental Psychology 45 (2016) 192e200 194 similarity with the suffering other. Research has shown that increased compassion leads to increased perceived self-other similarity (Oveis et al., 2010). If compassion appeals are to raise public support for climate policy, this effect may be more likely among audience members who feel more connected or similar to the suffering other; this abridged social distance may, in turn, motivate people to support government actions that can help alleviate the suffering. The last factor we highlight is the perception that the suffering other can, in fact, be helped (i.e., action efficacy). The feeling of compassion motivates moral judgments and is sensitive to harm-related concerns such as responsibility and vulnerability (Goetz et al., 2010)dthus, the stronger the belief that there are ways to aid the suffering other, the more likely it is that people who feel compassionate will offer help. In the context of climate change, if a tragedy is believed to be caused by human activities (as compared to nature), support for government actions to prevent similar tragedies may be expected to increase. 2. Motivated reasoning and climate change A number of recent studies have investigated how political ideology influences public opinion about climate change (e.g., Bohr, 2014; Hamilton, Hartter, Lemcke-Stampone, Moore, & Safford, 2015; Leiserowitz, Maibach, Roser-Renouf, Feinberg, & Rosenthal, 2014; Schuldt, Roh, & Schwarz, 2015). The general pattern found from this line of research is a large divide between Democrats and Republicans with regards to basic climate beliefs and support for climate mitigation policies. That is, most Democrats and liberals believe that anthropogenic forces have caused and continue to exacerbate climate change, and furthermore, express greater support for government actions to address the issue; by comparison, Republicans and conservatives are consistently less likely to espouse these beliefs and opinions. This disagreement largely reflects the political and ideological divisions between the two parties that have persisted over the past two decades (Krosnick, Holbrook, & Visser, 2000; McCright & Dunlap, 2011). Increasingly, scholars have interpreted such findings as reflecting motivated reasoning on the part of individuals who are predisposed to process climate-related information in ways that reinforce their preexisting views (Kunda, 1990). In practice, the tendency toward biased information processing may be so pronounced that exposure to the same information can engenderopposite effects across climate believers andclimate skeptics. Accumulatingevidencehasconfirmed that cognitive framing effects can be readily eclipsed by ideological commitments amongthoseatopposite endsof thepolitical spectrum (e.g., Hart & Nisbet, 2012). Some scholars have therefore suggested that attempts to persuade strong partisansmay be an ineffective and inefficient strategy for heightening support for mitigation policies among the general public (Carrico, Truelove, Vandenbergh, & Dana, 2015). However, a growing body of work has shown that situational cues (e.g., weather, incidental emotions) can influence strong partisans' beliefs about climate change (Egan & Mullin, 2012; Hamilton & Stampone, 2013; Lewandowski, Ciarocco, & Gately, 2012; Li, Johnson, & Zaval, 2011; Lu & Schuldt, 2015; Schuldt & Roh, 2014). Since the subjective feeling of compassion elicited by compassion appeals may serve as a situational cue, our study attempts to examine if such appeals are able to overcome stalwart resistance from conservatives, who may hold beliefs against climate change that are highly crystallized. Additionally, because some research indicates that making climate change cues salient in messaging (e.g., by explicitly linking a natural disaster to climate change) can further polarize attitudes and behavioral intentions between climatebelievers andskeptics (Chapman& Lickel, 2016),we also explorewhether increased compassion can override the salience of climate change cues in our study.