Resource Type: Social Science Research

While previous research has led to significant progress in our understanding of how to effectively communicate the existence and seriousness of climate change—and how to motivate people to behave in ways that help mitigate it—relatively little research has investigated the factors that lead to enduring change. This paper highlights three promising areas of research that can inform efforts to answer the question of how to generate enduring change—deep engagement, general mental models, and social norms—and proposes a research agenda aimed at generating enduring motivation to act on climate change.

The Climate Advocacy Lab and The All We Can Save Project came together to review the latest research and field testing about women’s engagement on climate change, before turning to excpetional female climate leaders – and contributing essayist for the forthcoming anthology, All We Can Save (AWCS) – about the powerful impacts of feminine & feminist climate leadership.

Reading climate fiction (or cli-fi) is a new but promising way to engage people who are not climate denialists, but who are not too concerned about climate change either. After reading a short cli-fi story, people believed more strongly that climate change would cause harm to themselves and future generations, as well as more severe droughts, poverty, and refugees. This, in turn, boosted belief that the President and Congress should make climate change a high priority. Notably, these belief changes were temporary, fading away after one month; this suggests that people may need to read cli-fi regularly to be persuaded more permanently.             

Legislators randomly assigned to be socially lobbied (meeting of a lobbyist and public official outside of a formal office visit) were more likely to take positions supporting the interest group’s preferred policy than were legislators lobbied in their offices or not contacted by the lobbyist. Legislators who were ideological allies of the interest group were most likely to be persuaded by social lobbying

Decades of political communication research has pointed to political persuasion (or changing someone’s mind) being one of the most difficult things to achieve, with campaigns having small effects on average. This would suggest that attempts at political persuasion, such as political ads in an electoral campaign, mostly do not move the needle much (if at all) with audiences. However, one response has been that these small average effects may be masking larger individual effects from sources of heterogeneity, or contextual pieces of a political ad such as message (content, tone, sponsor), audience (partisanship), and setting (battleground status, primary vs. general election, timing). 
Using an astonishing real-time design consisting of real ads from US presidential candidates, 59 unique experiments and 34,000 respondents over the course of the 2016 presidential election, the authors of this study find little evidence that any of the above conditions matter much when it comes to the persuasive effect of political ads on candidate favorability and vote choice. Indeed, owing to the large number of respondents (which makes finding even tiny effects more likely), the authors found a small but significant effect that ads can influence candidate favorability but no significant effect on ads actually influencing vote choice. In other words, the effectiveness of presidential campaign ads – even targeted ones – on persuading people to vote for one candidate or another may be greatly overstated.