Imagining Change: An Integrative Approach toward Explaining the Motivational Role of Mental Imagery in Pro-environmental Behavior

Abstract

Climate change and other long-term environmental issues are often perceived as abstract and difficult to imagine. The images a person associates with environmental change, i.e., a person’s environmental mental images, can be influenced by the visual information they come across in the public domain. This paper reviews the literature on this topic across social, environmental, and cognitive psychology, and the wider social sciences; thereby responding to a call for more critical investigations into people’s responses to visual information. By integrating the literature we come to a better understanding of the lack in vivid and concrete environmental mental imagery reported by the public, the link between environmental mental images and goals, and how affectively charged external images could help in making mental imagery less abstract. Preliminary research reports on the development of a new measure of environmental mental imagery and three tests of the relationship between environmental mental imagery, pro-environmental goals and behavior. Furthermore, the paper provides a program of research, drawing upon approaches from different disciplines, to set out the next steps needed to examine how and why we should encourage the public to imagine environmental change.

Public engagement with climate imagery in a changing digital landscape

“…Notably, the two studies only compared negative climate change images to positive images of nature, and did not measure attention to positive climate change imagery, such as mitigation and adaptation measures. Nonetheless, these attention studies are an important area for future work, and build upon related work showing that positive environmental attitudes lead to more vivid mental imagery when recalling climate-relevant images (Box 1) (Boomsma, Pahl, & Andrade, 2016).…”

Channelling passion for the ocean towards plastic pollution

“…For example, visualization is a powerful tool for engaging and motivating people, and ultimately changing behaviours. Visual images are associated with emotions that help develop memory traces and motivations, bridging abstract intentions to specific actions, especially where the problem and solution are disconnected [9,10]. Could we motivate action on plastic pollution by using powerful images on everyday products?…”

I Can See Clearly Now: Episodic Future Thinking and Imaginability in Perceptions of Climate-Related Risk Events

“…Prior research which contextualizes the current study includes studies on the relevance of mental imagery for perceptions of environmental change and risk perceptions specifically (Leviston et al, 2014;Boomsma et al, 2016;Liu et al, 2019). For example, some studies suggest an association between how people imagine scenarios and how they perceive environmental challenges.…”

“…For example, some studies suggest an association between how people imagine scenarios and how they perceive environmental challenges. In one study, researchers explored the vividness with which participants recalled a visual message related to environmental difficulties, showing an association between vividness and pro-environment goal-relevant thoughts, implying the importance of mental imagery for goal pursuit (Boomsma et al, 2016). We know of only one study which explored the effect of EFT on perceived risk for climate change (Lee et al, 2018).…”