Telling Tales: Narratives for Climate Change

Abstract

<p>The threat posed by climate change continues to escalate, yet global action falls short of the comprehensive change that is necessary. Despite persistent efforts, admittedly in a complex environment, the field of climate change communications has yet to achieve significant pro-environmental change at a societal level. In an effort to overcome this stalemate, some researchers have turned to storytelling, a time-tested persuasion tool, and this thesis does the same. Two studies were conducted to explore the impact of climate change messages sourced from the internet on intentions to act on climate change. The studies utilised the concept of Transportation Theory and the Transportation Scale to measure the capability of narratives to ‘transport’ participants into story worlds and affect their intentions. Results indicated that the experience of narrative transportation did predict intentions to act on climate change. Further, hand coding and linguistic text analysis were used to identify message attributes that predicted transportation. The third and final study in this research project built upon the findings of Studies 1 and 2 by examining voter attitudes towards carbon taxation, with the aim of generating insights that could inform the creation of narratives that might contribute to systemic change. A policy-capturing methodology was used to test the appeal of six different attributes of a proposed carbon tax on a sample of US registered voters. Results revealed various factors that were appealing to different subaudiences. The papers that follow detail these findings and discuss the development and improvement of climate-related stories.</p>