Cli-fi videos can increase charitable donations: experimental evidence from the United Kingdom.

Recent research has begun to investigate if climate fiction, or cli-fi, can increase people's support for pro-climate initiatives. Emerging evidence focuses on whether cli-fi stories affect people's self-reported emotions, attitudes, and intentions. Few studies, however, examine the effect of such stories on revealed behavior, and whether the cli-fi story medium, i.e., whether stories are presented in text, audio, or audio-visual format, matters. We investigate the causal effect of cli-fi stories, and the medium through which they are communicated (textual, audio, or audio-visual) on self-reported support for climate policy, individual and collective action intentions, and a revealed measure of charitable donations. In a pre-registered online experiment (n = 1,085 UK adults), participants were randomly assigned to one of 5 conditions - to read scientific information about climate change (scientific information condition), read a story unrelated to the environment (control), read a cli-fi story in which a protagonist took intentional pro-environmental actions (fiction text), listen to the same cli-fi story in audio format (fiction audio), or watch an animation of the cli-fi story (fiction video). When comparing the fiction-text, fact-text, and control conditions, we found that cli-fi stories are not always more effective than alternative climate communications: participants in the fact-text condition reported higher support for climate policies, and intentions of taking individual environmental actions, and negative feelings of sadness, disappointment, and guilt, compared to the text-based control and cli-fi text condition. When comparing the cli-fi media format, we found that cli-fi videos were most effective in increasing pro-environmental charitable donations in an incentivized choice task, and self-reported feelings of happiness, hope, and inspiration. The findings show that scientific information about the climate and climate-fiction have an important place in the climate communications toolkit and can offer distinct pathways to enhance support for policy and behavioral change. Communicators seeking to inspire individual pro-environmental actions can consider telling cli-fi stories in video, which may be more compelling. And communicators seeking to enhance public support for societal changes, via climate policies, may benefit from disseminating scientific information about climate change.

Experimental evidence of the impact of framing of actors and victims in conservation narratives.

Media narratives play a crucial role in framing marine conservation dilemmas by depicting human actors, such as fish consumers or the fishing industry, as responsible for negative effects of their actions on species and ecosystems. However, there is little evidence documenting how such narratives affect preferences for reducing bycatch. Behavioral science research shows that people can act less prosocially when more actors are responsible for a collective outcome (responsibility diffusion effect) and when more victims need to be helped (compassion fade effect); thus, the media's framing of actors and victims may have a significant effect on preferences. We conducted the first test of responsibility diffusion and compassion fade in a marine context in an online experiment (1548 participants in the United Kingdom). In 9 media narratives, we varied the type of actors responsible for fisheries bycatch (e.g., consumers and industry) and victims (e.g., a single species, multiple species, and ecosystems) in media narratives and determined the effects of the narratives on participants' support for bycatch policies and intentions to alter fish consumption. When responsibility for negative effects was attributed to consumers and industry, the probability of participants reporting support for fisheries policies (e.g., bycatch enforcement or consumer taxes) was ∼30% higher (odds ratio = 1.32) than when only consumers were attributed responsibility. These effects were primarily driven by female participants. Narratives had no effect on personal intentions to consume fish. Varying the type of victim had no effect on policy support and intentions. Our results suggest that neither responsibility diffusion nor compassion fade automatically follows from increasing the types of actors and victims in media narratives and that effects can depend on the type of outcome and population subgroup.

Las narrativas mediáticas juegan un papel importante en el encuadre de los dilemas de conservación marina al representar a los actores humanos, por ejemplo, los consumidores de pescado o la industria pesquera, como los responsables de los efectos negativos de sus acciones sobre las especies y ecosistemas. Sin embargo, hay poca evidencia que documente cómo estas narrativas afectan las preferencias para reducir la captura incidental. Investigaciones de la ciencia conductual muestran que las personas pueden actuar menos a favor de la sociedad cuando más actores son responsables de un resultado colectivo (efecto de difusión de la responsabilidad) y cuando más víctimas necesitan asistencia (efecto de la desaparición de la compasión); por lo tanto, el encuadre mediático de los actores y las víctimas puede tener un efecto significativo sobre las preferencias. Realizamos el primer análisis de la difusión de la responsabilidad y la desaparición de la compasión en un contexto marino con un experimento en línea (1,548 participantes en el Reino Unido). Diversificamos el tipo de actores responsables de la captura incidental (p. ej.: consumidores e industria) y sus víctimas (p. ej.: una sola especie, múltiples especies y ecosistemas) en nueve narrativas mediáticas y determinamos sus efectos sobre el respaldo que dan los participantes a las políticas de captura incidental y sus intenciones de alterar el consumo de pescado. Cuando se le atribuyó la responsabilidad de los efectos negativos a los consumidores y a la industria, la probabilidad de que los participantes apoyaran las políticas pesqueras (p. ej.: implementación de la captura incidental o impuestos al consumidor) fue ∼30% más alta (razón de probabilidad = 1.32) que cuando se le atribuyó la responsabilidad solamente a los consumidores. Estos efectos fueron impulsados principalmente por las mujeres participantes. Las narrativas no tuvieron efectos sobre las intenciones personales de consumir pescado. La variación en el tipo de víctimas no tuvo efectos sobre el apoyo a las políticas y las intenciones. Nuestros resultados sugieren que ni la difusión de la responsabilidad ni la desaparición de la compasión ocurren automáticamente tras incrementar los tipos de actores y víctimas en las narrativas mediáticas y que los efectos pueden depender del tipo de resultado y del subgrupo poblacional. Evidencia Experimental del Impacto que Tiene el Encuadre de los Actores y las Víctimas en las Narrativas de Conservación.

Stories of intentional action mobilise climate policy support and action intentions.

What makes a climate story effective? We examined if short fiction stories about everyday pro-environmental behaviours motivate climate policy support, and individual and collective climate action in a nationally representative experiment (N = 903 UK adults). The story featuring protagonists driven by pro-environmental intentions (i.e., the intentional environmentalist narrative) increased participants' support for pro-climate policies and intentions to take both individual and collective pro-environmental actions, more so than did stories featuring protagonists whose pro-environmental behaviours were driven by intentions to gain social status, to protect their health, and a control story. Participants' stronger feelings of identification with the protagonist partially explained these effects of the intentional environmentalist narrative. Results highlight that narrating intentional, rather than unintentional, pro-environmental action can enhance readers' climate policy support and intentions to perform pro-environmental action. Therefore, the intentions driving pro-environmental action may have implications for the extent to which observes identify with the actor and take pro-environmental action themselves.

Linking Human Destruction of Nature to COVID-19 Increases Support for Wildlife Conservation Policies.

This paper investigates if narratives varying the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic affects pro-wildlife conservation outcomes. In a pre-registered online experiment (N = 1081), we randomly allocated subjects to either a control group or to one of three narrative treatment groups, each presenting a different likely cause of the COVID-19 outbreak: an animal cause; an animal and human cause (AHC); and an animal, human or lab cause. We found that the AHC narrative elicited significantly greater pro-conservation policy support, especially for bans in the commercial trade of wildlife, when compared to the control group. Possible mechanisms driving this effect are that AHC narratives were less familiar, elicited higher mental and emotional engagement, and induced feelings that firms and governments are responsible for mitigating wildlife extinction.

Agriculture and malnutrition in India.

BACKGROUND: Despite the high and relatively stable overall growth of the economy, India's agriculture sector is underperforming and a vast section of the population remains undernourished. OBJECTIVE: To explore the possible interplay between agricultural performance and malnutrition indicators to see whether states that perform better in agriculture record better nutritional outcomes. METHODS: Correlation analysis and a simple linear regression model were used to study the relationship between agricultural performance and malnutrition among children under 5 years of age and adults from 15 to 49 years of age at 20 major states using data from the National Family Health Survey-3 for the year 2005/06 and the national accounts. RESULTS: Indicators of the level of agricultural performance or income have a strong and significant negative relationship with indices of undernutrition among adults and children, a result suggesting that improvement of agricultural productivity can be a powerful tool to reduce undernutrition across the vast majority of the population. In addition to agriculture, access to sanitation facilities and women's literacy were also found to be strong factors affecting malnutrition. Access to healthcare for women and child-care practices, in particular breastfeeding within 1 hour after birth, are other important determinants of malnutrition among adults and children. CONCLUSIONS: Malnutrition is a multidimensional problem that requires multisectoral interventions. The findings show that improving agricultural performance can have a positive impact on nutritional outcomes. However, improvements in agriculture alone cannot be effective in combating malnutrition if several other mediating factors are not in place. Interventions to improve education, health, sanitation and household infrastructure, and care and feeding practices are critical. Innovative strategies that integrate agriculture and nutrition programs stand a better chance of combating the malnutrition problem.