ABSTRACT-Despite a long tradition of effectiveness in laboratory tests

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Since May 24, 2006 millions of people have seen the movie "An Inconvenient Truth:'Several countries have evenproposed using the film asaneducational tool in school classrooms. However, it is not yet clear that the movie accomplishes its apparent goals of increasing knowledge and concern,and motivating people to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.Two studies are reported, one with a sample of community moviegoers, and one witha sample ofstudents.Acrossthe two studies,results show that watching "An InconvenientTruth" does increase knowledge about the causes of global warming, concern for the environment, and willingness to reduce greenhouse gases. However, the results of Study 2 suggest that willingness to take action immediately following movie viewing does not necessarily translate into action I month later. Recommendations are made for how the movie could be used to create behavioral change. Keywords conservation behavior, global warming, knowledge-deficit theory On May 24, 2006, Paramount Classics released the film "An Inconvenient Truth" (AIT) in New York and Los Angeles. Approximately 3 years later, the film has received numerous awards and ranks as the fifth-highest grossing

The influence of social norms on behavior has been a longstanding storyline within social psychology. Our 2007 Psychological Science publication presented a new rendition of this classic telling. The reported field experiment showed that social norms could be leveraged to promote residential energy conservation, but importantly, the descriptive norm was shown to increase consumption for low-consuming households. This potential destructive effect of social norms was eliminated with the addition of an injunctive message of social approval for using less energy. The article is among the 30 most-cited articles across all APS publications, which we attribute to our methodology, which measured real behavior in a large-scale field experiment and to several circumstances associated with the timing of the work. The article coincided with the explosion of social media, the emergence of behavioral economics, and a heightened level of concern about climate change. These contemporaneous activities set the stage for our work and for its high degree of citation.

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