How do I feel when I think about taking action? Hope and boredom, not anxiety and helplessness, predict intentions to take climate action

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2021.101649Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Examined how emotions when contemplating taking climate action predict action intentions.

  • Hope strongly predicted greater intentions to take action.

  • Boredom moderately predicted lesser intentions to take action.

  • In contrast, anxiety and helplessness did not have strong predictive power.

Abstract

This research examines the extent to which four anticipatory emotional reactions (hope, anxiety, helplessness, and boredom) that arise when contemplating participating in public-sphere climate action predict intentions to engage in such action. In a large, geographically diverse sample of American adults visiting informal science learning centers (e.g., zoos, aquariums; N = 4964), stronger feelings of hope robustly predicted greater intentions to act (η2p = .22, a large effect); whereas stronger feelings of boredom robustly predicted decreased intention to act (η2p = .09, a medium effect). Both of these feelings had significantly more predictive power than political orientation (η2p = .04, a small-to-medium effect). The extent to which respondents felt anxious or helpless was not strongly correlated with their intentions to take action (η2ps ≈ 0.01, a small effect). These findings highlight the underexplored connection between how people feel when they contemplate taking climate action and their intentions to engage in such action.

Introduction

Effectively addressing the interconnected human causes of global climate change will be facilitated by widespread public engagement in a variety of public-sphere behaviors, such as civic action and talking with others, to achieve coordinated climate action (Geiger, Swim, & Fraser, 2017; Goldberg, van der Linden, Maibach, & Leiserowitz, 2019; Habermas, 1971; Parks, Joireman, & Van Lange, 2013; Rees & Bamberg, 2014; Stern, 2000; Swim, Geiger, Sweetland, & Fraser, 2018). Contradicting the view that emotional reactions foster irrational and maladaptive behavior, research reveals that emotional experiences can play a key role in facilitating constructive behaviors on societal threats (Brosch, 2021; Fessler & Haley, 2003; Smith & Mackie, 2016; Yang, 2000). Previous research on emotional reactions related to climate change has focused chiefly on assessing emotional reactions related to climate change at a broad level. As we explain below, this literature has suffered from largely inconsistent results. We propose that these mixed results could arise because people do not make decisions about whether to take action on climate change when contemplating the threat of climate change in the abstract. Instead, individuals might be more influenced by feelings that arise when they directly contemplate taking action on the issue. Thus, in this project, we take the targeted approach of measuring and comparing emotional reactions when contemplating the possibility of taking public-sphere action.

Emotional reactions are felt experiences that arise from appraisals about one's environment and thus provide affective information about an individual's present situation and potential future outcomes (Schwarz & Clore, 1983). In the present work, we focus on anticipatory emotional reactions - states such as hope and anxiety which are experienced in the present in response to contemplating possible future actions or events. Anticipatory emotional reactions contrast with anticipated emotions, which are not necessarily experienced in the present moment but rather affective forecasts of how one expects to feel in the future; Baumgartner, Pieters, & Bagozzi, 2008; Loewenstein, Weber, Hsee, & Welch, 2001; Wilson & Gilbert, 2003; Xu & Guo, 2019). Anticipatory emotional reactions can result from a variety of future possibilities, including possible threats that may occur in the future, and relevant to the current work, possible actions that one could take in the future. Within these specific contexts, anticipatory emotional reactions provide information that can either motivate or demotivate goal pursuit (see Oettingen, 2012).

Much past work on feelings and climate change has focused on assessing people's emotional reactions – specifically, hope and anxiety (and the related emotion of fear) - to climate change in general (e.g., Nabi, Gustafson, & Jensen, 2018; Rees, Klug, & Bamberg, 2015; Roeser, 2012; Smith & Leiserowitz, 2014; Wang, Leviston, Hurlstone, Lawrence, & Walker, 2018) rather than anticipatory emotional reactions that occur when contemplating taking action on climate change. This previous work has produced mixed results as to how these reactions, especially hope and anxiety (i.e., “climate anxiety”), might predict engagement with climate change and support for climate-friendly policies. Some research suggests that hope motivates over anxiety (Bury, Wenzel, & Woodyatt, 2019; Ojala, 2012; O'Neill & Nicholson-Cole, 2009; Smith & Leiserowitz, 2014), while other work highlights the motivating power of anxiety over hope (Hornsey & Fielding, 2016; Tannenbaum et al., 2015; van Zomeren, Pauls, & Cohen-Chen, 2019; van Zomeren, Spears, & Leach, 2010). Still other work suggests that both can be motivating (Nabi et al., 2018) or that the effects might differ depending on other factors, such as the audience's political orientations or how hope is defined (Feldman & Hart, 2016; Marlon et al., 2019).

A commentary on much of this work argues that inconsistent findings for the same emotions may reflect an overly simplistic manner of assessing emotional reactions (Chapman, Lickel, & Markowitz, 2017). Chapman and colleagues argue that inconsistencies derive from the unverified assumption that emotions exert consistent effects on climate action regardless of the context in which they are experienced. To illustrate the limitations of such an assumption, Chapman's critique highlights how anger can affect different types of actions: anger might be presupposed to lead to destructive, aggressive behavior, but it may also promote constructive activities aimed to achieve justice and right moral wrongs (also see Van Doorn, Zeelenberg, & Breugelmans, 2014). Another example comes from Hasan-Aslih, Pliskin, van Zomeren, Halperin, and Saguy (2019), who examined the relationship between hope and nonviolent collective action intentions among Palestinians following systematic house demolitions by the Israeli government (an event that was presumably viewed as deeply oppressive and immoral by many Palestinians). Across several correlational and experimental studies, feeling hopeful about using collective struggle to liberate their society from oppression predicted greater intentions to engage in nonviolent collective action. In contrast, feeling hopeful about the possibility of Palestinians and Israelis peacefully coexisting together in the future (i.e., hope about the situation not directly tied to taking action) predicted null or even lesser intentions to engage in such action.

Together, these examples highlight the psychological perspective that, with regard to consciously controlled decision-making, the link between emotional experiences and action depends on how such feelings influence, and are influenced by, contemplation of specific potential future scenarios (Baumeister, Vohs, Nathan DeWall, & Zhang, 2007; Forgas, 1995). Although incidental emotions (i.e., emotions evoked by unrelated stimuli) can influence reactions to climate change (in the form of climate policy support; Lu & Schuldt, 2015), emotional reactions are most likely to influence decision-making on complex issues (e.g., about whether or not to take action on a given issue) when the feelings directly arise from contemplating the various options or actions. Thus, researchers might benefit from directly assessing the emotional reactions that individuals experience when contemplating target behaviors.

Here we assess emotional reactions attributed to thoughts about engaging in public-sphere action to mitigate climate change (rather than contemplation of climate change more generally). We investigated four different anticipatory emotional reactions – hope, anxiety, helplessness, and boredom – that have been linked to motivation in a variety of domains (e.g., Miele & Scholer, 2018; Pekrun, 2006; Pekrun & Stephens, 2010) and appear to have potential relevance for promoting or discouraging public-sphere action. Hope and anxiety signal uncertainty of possible outcomes and signal a preference for some outcomes over others, though they can encourage different responses (Ellsworth & Smith, 1988; Ortony, Clore, & Collins, 1990). Helplessness signals a lack of control over achieving a target goal (Seligman, Abramson, Semmel, & Von Baeyer, 1979). Boredom signals that the target of one's contemplation is meaningless (Van Tilburg & Igou, 2012). Below, we discuss each of these states and their link to engaging in public-sphere climate action.

Hope emerges when people perceive the potential for a desirable event to arise in the future (Ortony et al., 1990). When individuals feel hope while contemplating a goal, that hope signals that the goal is possible, important, and attainable through personal efforts (Averill, Catlin, & Chon, 2012; Gasper, Spencer, & Middlewood, 2019), thus activating action tendencies (Pekrun & Stephens, 2010) and promoting effort toward one's goal (Roseman, 2011; Snyder, 2002). Given these general effects of hope, several climate change researchers have argued that communicators should seek to instill hope in their audience (e.g., Mann, Hassol, & Toles, 2017; T. A. Myers, Nisbet, Maibach, & Leiserowitz, 2012). As noted above, however, work examining hope related to the risk of climate change paints a mixed picture as an effective motivational tool, perhaps because different participants might have different target objects in mind when answering the question. In turn, these different target objects might influence whether individuals take on a problem-focused coping role (motivating action) or an emotion-focused coping role (demotivating action; van Zomeren et al., 2019). In contrast, hope elicited in response to the possibility of taking specific interpersonal actions (e.g., discussing climate change) appears to more consistently promote a problem-focused coping role and predicts engagement with those actions (Geiger, Gasper, Swim, & Fraser, 2019; Swim & Fraser, 2014). Furthermore, perceptions of self- and collective efficacy are related to hope about taking action (Carifio & Rhodes, 2002) and these efficacy perceptions also predict pro-environmental behavioral intentions (Doherty & Webler, 2016; Geiger et al., 2017; Jugert et al., 2016). Based on the above review, we hypothesize:

H1

Feeling hopeful when contemplating engaging in climate action will positively predict intentions to engage in such action.

Whereas hope reflects an appraisal focused on desirable possibilities, anxiety emerges when people recognize the potential for undesirable events to arise in the future (Arnau, 2018; Ortony et al., 1990). Anxiety is a high arousal state that can include tension, apprehension, and nervousness (Brooks & Schweitzer, 2011). Although anxiety, like hope, signals both importance and uncertainty (Ellsworth & Smith, 1988), anxiety also signals lack of control (Raghunathan & Pham, 1999) and encourages people to adopt a prevention orientation, seeking out safety from the anxiety-eliciting target object (Higgins, 1998; Roseman, 2011). As noted above, some (but not all) research suggests that anxiety elicited when individuals contemplate the general idea of climate change fosters motivation to take action, presumably to reduce the threat posed by climate change. In contrast, however, feeling anxiety when contemplating taking action might be associated with avoiding such action. People might feel afraid about being perceived negatively by others if they were to engage in the target action (Geiger & Swim, 2016), including concerns about being associated with stigmatized groups (Swim, Gillis, & Hamaty, 2019), or alternatively, might fear failure (Caraway, Tucker, Reinke, & Hall, 2003) or being taken advantage of by others who fail to cooperate (Insko, Schopler, Hoyle, Dardis, & Graetz, 1990). Thus, we hypothesize:

H2

Feeling anxiety when contemplating engaging in climate action will negatively predict intentions to engage in such action.

Helplessness is a low arousal, anticipatory emotional reaction to the perception that one has little control over future adverse events (Gelbrich, 2010; Lazarus, 1991).1 The feeling of helplessness has been studied in a variety of contexts, including an examination of university students’ reactions to coursework (Tze, Daniels, Hamm, Parker, & Perry, 2020), consumer responses to negative experiences at hotels (Gelbrich, 2010), and relevant to the present work, as a predictor of climate policy support (Smith & Leiserowitz, 2014). Previous work provides competing hypotheses for the effects of helplessness. Some theoretical models (e.g., the theory of planned behavior; Ajzen, 1991) suggest that perceived behavioral control is a key determinant of behavior; thus, feeling helpless (i.e., low behavioral control) might demotivate action. Indeed, some work suggests that feeling helpless or the related judgment that one would be unable to affect change through taking action (i.e., low response efficacy) is negatively related to climate action (Doherty & Webler, 2016; Geiger et al., 2017; Norgaard, 2011; Salomon, Preston, & Tannenbaum, 2017). In contrast, the social identity model of collective action (van Zomeren, Postmes, & Spears, 2008) argues that collective action issues are defined by personal helplessness because an individual acting alone cannot solve such problems. This model suggests that feeling personally helpless is not demotivating and, in some cases, can even motivate group cohesion and cooperative action to solve collective problems (Fritsche et al., 2017). Consistent with the possibility that feelings of helplessness might not strongly influence climate engagement, Smith and Leiserowitz (2014) found that feeling helpless about climate change did not uniquely predict climate policy support. Yet, this latter work did not directly assess whether people feel helpless when contemplating taking action. Based on these divergent perspectives, we ask the following research question:

  • Research Question 1: Does feeling helpless when contemplating engaging in climate action predict intentions to engage in such action?

Boredom is a feeling reflecting a lack of psychological flow or immersion (Brissett & Snow, 1993). Boredom arises when people have difficulty paying attention to tasks or stimuli and provides an affective signal to disengage from those tasks and stimuli (Westgate & Wilson, 2018). Boredom can arise when there is a perceived mismatch between the cognitive demands of the task and one's mental resources to accomplish it; the task is perceived as either a) too easy (i.e., tedious), or b) too difficult (i.e., overwhelming). Boredom also can result from individuals' perceptions that the task lacks meaning (van Tilburg & Igou, 2013) and intrinsic value (Miele & Scholer, 2018). Thus, people who feel boredom when contemplating engaging in climate action with others might view the action as tedious (too easy), overwhelming (too difficult), or lacking in meaning (low intrinsic value).

Examining anticipatory boredom acknowledges the possibility that one does not need to start a task to feel bored by the task; instead, simply considering the possibility of engaging in a task could lead to boredom. For example, when merely considering the possibility of doing one's taxes a couple of months before they are due, one might become bored and suddenly remember their more exciting plan to go for a hike. Feeling bored when contemplating taking action might reduce narrative transportation (i.e., the tendency to imagine possible scenarios vividly; see McLaughlin, Velez, & Dunn, 2019), a key predictor of intentions to take action (McLaughlin, Velez, Gotlieb, Thompson, & Krause-McCord, 2019). As such, we propose that experiencing anticipatory boredom when contemplating possible future action might have similar effects to other forms of experienced boredom: reduced motivation and effort (Pekrun & Stephens, 2010; Tze, Klassen, & Daniels, 2014) and reduced procrastination (Steel, 2007) within that domain. Consistent with this notion, preliminary work suggests that feeling boredom in reaction to contemplating either climate change or the Covid-19 pandemic (i.e., not taking action specifically, but the topic more generally) predicts lesser intentions to engage in mitigation actions on the respective topics(Geiger, Gore, Squire, & Attari, 2021). Thus, we hypothesize the following:

H3

Feeling bored when contemplating engaging in climate action will negatively predict intentions to engage in such action.

Climate change is politically polarized in the United States (Pew Research Center, 2019) and other English-speaking countries (E. K. Smith & Mayer, 2019). In these regions, an overwhelming majority of political liberals report concern about and support action to address climate change, while political conservatives tend to be less concerned and are more ambivalent about taking action (Jenkins-Smith et al., 2020). A meta-analysis (Hornsey, Harris, Bain, & Fielding, 2016) conducted on data collected across multiple countries finds that political partisanship and self-reported ideology are moderate and robust predictors of climate change belief (correlated at r = .30 and r = 0.15, respectively). Other work finds similar links between political views and the propensity to take climate-relevant action (Nabi et al., 2018). Political views also could correlate with affect that arises when contemplating taking action on climate change. For example, if climate action is less meaningful to political conservatives, on average, than to political liberals, then political conservatives might feel more bored than do political liberals when considering the possibility of engaging in climate action. Thus, when assessing relations between emotional experiences and intentions to take action, we control for political orientation (to verify that feelings predict action above and beyond political orientation) and also address the following research question:

  • Research Question 2: Do any of the feelings mentioned above predict climate action intentions more strongly than does political orientation?

An additional possibility is that political orientation might moderate the effects of emotional reactions on climate change action. Even when liberals and conservatives feel the same way about climate action, they may react differently to specific emotional experiences. For example, liberals may be more likely to act based on positive feelings, such as hope, while conservatives may be more likely to act based on negative feelings, such as anxiety (Cornwell & Higgins, 2013, also see; Feldman & Hart, 2016). These possibilities are speculative; we do not have any a priori predictions about how political orientation might moderate these relationships, so we ask the following research question.

Research Question 3: Does political orientation moderate any of the links between emotional reactions and public sphere climate action intentions, such that some reactions more strongly (or weakly) predict such intentions among political liberals than conservatives?

Section snippets

Present research

We examined the degree to which the four above-mentioned emotional reactions and political orientation predicted intentions to engage in public-sphere climate action among a large sample of visitors to aquariums and zoos; a broad population that has shown receptivity to climate change engagement efforts (Falk et al., 2007; Swim, Geiger, Fraser, & Pletcher, 2017). We focus on public-sphere behaviors based on the scope of climate change and the need for widespread cultural and political change to

Participants and procedure

Respondents (N = 4964) were adult visitors to one of 116 informal science learning centers (ISLCs, e.g., zoos and aquariums) around the US who volunteered to complete all relevant measures in a survey following a request to do so immediately after a presentation at an interactive exhibit or other institutional space between 2012 and 2016.2

Results

We conducted a multiple linear regression, regressing climate action intentions onto political orientation and the four measured emotional reactions. Collinearity was not a concern (all VIFs < 2.5). To examine whether the effect sizes of predictors were significantly different from one another, we reran the regression model with all variables standardized (hence, providing standardized beta coefficients). We then conducted linear hypothesis tests using the car package (Fox et al., 2018) in r (R

Discussion

The data reveal that emotional reactions resulting from contemplating engaging in public-sphere climate action predict intentions to engage in such action. Specifically, the level of hope and boredom respondents experienced when contemplating taking action robustly predicted behavioral intentions, but the level of anxiety and helplessness experienced did not. As we explain in greater detail below, the patterns in our results are consistent with the notion that emotional reactions signaling

Conclusion

When mobilizing the British people against fascism and the Nazis in World War II, Winston Churchill, in his first speech as Prime Minister to the House of Commons, famously said, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” This quote, and the extensive speech in which it was embedded, acknowledged that the cause would be difficult and attempted to inspire motivating feelings (such as hope) tied directly to the possibility of taking necessary but difficult action. Our results

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Nathaniel Geiger: Conceptualization, Investigation, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft, Supervision. Janet K. Swim: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Writing – review & editing, Supervision. Karen Gasper: Writing – review & editing. John Fraser: Funding acquisition, Project administration, Investigation, Writing – review & editing. Kate Flinner: Project administration, Investigation, Writing – review & editing.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the members of the National Network for Ocean and Climate Change Interpretation (NNOCCI), William (Billy) Spitzer and the team at New England Aquarium supporting NNOCCI, Shelley J. Rank, Sean Beharry and the rest of the NewKnowledge team.

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