Exploitation of mortality salience in communication on climate change

Abstract

This research focuses on the effectiveness of anxiety-inducing communication for mobilizing consumers against climate change. Based on terror management theory (TMT), we show that this register can be counterproductive in generating consumer choices that run counter to pro-environmental logics. In particular, we report the results of an experiment ( N = 132) testing the influence of the type of communication (anxiogenic vs informative) on consumer choices (pro-materialistic vs pro-environmental). The results reveal that people’s consumption choices depend on their cultural worldviews (i.e. materialistic vs environmentalist) and the type of communication used. The effectiveness of communication strategies on climate change is then discussed in terms of people’s cultural worldview.

Climate change and marketing: Stranded research or a sustainable development?

“…In order to be able to achieve this, there is emphasis on gaining an improved understanding of the climate change views of the public (Chryst et al, ; Morrison, Duncan, Sherley, & Parton, ; Peattie et al, ) as well as key stakeholders (Bocken & Allwood, ; Poudyal, Siry, & Bowker, ). Audience segmentation has also been identified as crucial to improved climate change communication (Hine et al, , ; Hine et al, ; Morrison, Duncan, & Parton, ; Sherley, Morrison, Duncan, & Parton, ), as well as improvements in messaging (Akil, Robert‐Demontrond, & Bouillé, ; Anghelcev, Chung, Sar, & Duff, ; Noble, Pomering, & Johnson, ).…”

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Eco-Apocalypse: An Existential Approach to Accepting Eco-Anxiety

“…When people are subtly reminded of prosocial values by, for example, overhearing an experimental confederate mention the importance of helping others on a cell phone as they pass by a cemetery, those values are the ones terror-management defenses boost (Gailliot et al, 2008). Similar lines of research have shown that under the right circumstances, mortality salience can be used to increase prosocial ( Joireman & Duell, 2007) and pro-environment inclinations (Fritsche et al, 2010), especially when a particular value is already strongly held (Akil et al, 2018) or when the beneficiary of the prosocial behavior is part of one's in-group ( Jonas et al, 2002).…”

“…People react in these same self-destructive ways when exposed to threatening information about climate crisis. Several studies replaced the standard mortality-salience prompts with climate-crisis-salience prompts and demonstrated that thinking of climate crisis also tends to promote ethnocentrism (Uhl et al, 2017), increase aggression toward out-groups (Fritsche et al, 2012), and elevate levels of anxiety-compensatory consumerism (Akil et al, 2018). Likewise, thinking of impending natural disasters directly increases death anxiety, which people often attempt to manage by engaging in behaviors that promote the illusion of agency at the expense of real safety, such as ignoring evacuation warnings in favor of staying in houses directly in the path of a hurricane (Atalay & Meloy, 2020).…”

“…Likewise, thinking of impending natural disasters directly increases death anxiety, which people often attempt to manage by engaging in behaviors that promote the illusion of agency at the expense of real safety, such as ignoring evacuation warnings in favor of staying in houses directly in the path of a hurricane (Atalay & Meloy, 2020). Such effects hold true even among people who do not espouse environmental values, which shows that one need not be an environmentalist or even, necessarily, believe in climate crisis to be subconsciously affected by eco-anxiety (Akil et al, 2018). The empirical evidence that people enact almost identical terror-management defenses in response to both mortality- and climate-crisis-salience bolsters what psychologists such as Panu Pihkala (2018) and Anoushka Grose (2020) have asserted: Eco-anxiety is a form of death anxiety.…”

Fostering collective climate action and leadership: Insights from a pilot experiment involving mindfulness and compassion

“…When faced with such complex problems, individuals tend to resort to what they know, making attitude and behavior change unlikely, especially if overwhelming inner states such as anxiety or loss of control emerge. 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 The resulting uncertainty and unpredictability hinders climate action on individual, collective or organizational, and system levels. 7 , 8 …”