The Environmental Innovations Initiative's Climate 101 series demystifies climate change and its link with a diversity of disciplines. Experts from across Penn share how they think about climate through the lens of their research and teaching, helping to raise our climate literacy and prepare us to tackle one of the planet's greatest challenges: the climate crisis.

Join us for October's Climate 101 event with Allie Sinclair, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Communication Neuroscience Lab and Annenberg Public Policy Center, where she will talk about Climate Change and Communication:

Motivating Pro-Environmental Behavior Change and Information Consumption

A majority of people in the U.S. and globally believe that climate change is happening, yet many are not acting on those beliefs in daily life. How can we motivate people to take action and share information about climate change? To address these goals, we conducted an “intervention tournament” to systematically test and compare strategies. This tournament approach allows us to identify which strategies work best, and for whom. We tested 17 brief psychological interventions in a sample of 7,624 U.S. adults. The most effective interventions for motivating action to help mitigate climate change involved guiding people to think about the future, especially future scenarios that involved themselves or close others. The most effective interventions for motivating sharing of news headlines and petitions about climate change involved prompting people to identify how climate change is relevant to themselves and people they know. In related studies, we tested how the emotional framing of environmental news headlines—retelling the same stories to highlight crisis or opportunity—influences desire to read and share news, real donations to charities related to issues in the news, and future memory for news details. We show that emphasizing crisis can spur immediate action, but emphasizing opportunity evokes positive emotions and enhances lasting memory for news content. Taken together, our findings reveal scalable strategies that communicators can use to motivate pro-environmental behavior change and information consumption.

All events are Hybrid, and are held in Annenberg School for Communication, Room 300. Please register below.