Resource Type: Social Science Research

Use emotionally positive images of climate change solutions to grab people’s attention. Using experiments with undergraduate students that measure individuals’ reaction time, researchers found that positive images of climate change, like windmills and solar panels, were better at grabbing participants’ attention than negative images of causes (smokestacks, air pollution) and effects (glaciers melting) of climate change. In fact, using negative images of climate change was no more attention grabbing than images irrelevant to climate change. The use of positive images may be even more important for grabbing the attention of those who are least disposed to care about the environment and climate change. So, when developing media and communication information, consider using positive images of climate change solutions.