Depicting worst-case climate scenarios like expanding deserts and dying coral reefs may higher motivate people to support environmental policies when delivered via virtual reality, in line with a research team led by Penn State that studied how VR and message framing affect the impact of environmental advocacy communications. The study findings, published within the journal Science Communication, may help advocacy groups resolve how best to border and deliver their messages.
The researchers examined individuals’ responses to climate change messaging when delivered through traditional video and desktop virtual reality — VR programs like Google Earth that may run on a cell phone or computer. They found that loss-framed messages, or people who transitioned from a positive to negative climate scenario to emphasise what humanity has to lose, were simpler at convincing people to support environmental policies when delivered via VR. Gain-framed messages, which depict a more hope-inspiring change from a negative to a positive environmental final result, had a greater impact when delivered through traditional video format.
“The findings of this study suggest that by way of looking for support for climate change policy, it’s the mixture of the medium and the message that may determine essentially the most effective solution for promoting a specific advocacy message,” said S. Shyam Sundar, senior creator and the James P. Jimirro Professor of Media Effects at Penn State. “For consumers, the media literacy message here is that you just’re rather more emotionally vulnerable or more more likely to be swayed by a VR presentation of an advocacy message, especially if the presentation focuses on loss.”
The research team created two desktop virtual reality experiences, one gain-framed and one loss-framed, using the Unity3D game engine. Along with the loss and gain framed messages, the VR programs also depicted healthy and unhealthy coral reef ecosystems, accompanied by lighter or darker ambient lighting and hopeful or sad audio, and allowed users to explore the aquatic environments. The researchers used the programs to record loss- and gain-framed videos based on the VR experiences.
They selected to depict coral reef ecosystems because corals are one among the species most endangered by the consequences of climate change and much faraway from many peoples’ lived experiences.
“It’s difficult to speak environmental issues to non-scientists because the results are frequently long-term and never easily foreseeable,” said Mengqi Liao, first creator and doctoral candidate in mass communication at Penn State. “Not to say that it’s always very hard to bring people to an environment that has been damaged by climate change, comparable to coral reefs, which, based on many years of information collected partially from NASA’s airborne and satellite missions, have declined rapidly over the past 30 years. That is where VR is useful. You may bring the environment to people and show them what would occur if we fail to act.”
The researchers recruited 130 participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk and asked them to finish a pre-questionnaire to measure variables like attitudes toward climate change and political ideology. Then they randomly assigned participants to a video or desktop VR experience. Inside each of those groups, half saw the gain-framed messaging while the opposite half saw the loss-framed messaging.
Participants within the loss-framed experiences saw healthy then unhealthy coral ecosystems, with a message explaining the negative consequences of failing to adopt climate change mitigation behaviors. Those within the gain-framed versions saw unhealthy then healthy coral ecosystems, with messages explaining the positive impacts of adopting climate policies. After completing the experiences, participants answered a questionnaire to measure how likely they’d be to support environmental policies.
The researchers found that loss-framed messages were handiest at motivating people to support climate change mitigation policies when delivered through desktop VR. Gain-framed messages were handiest when delivered in video format.
Virtual reality is inherently interesting and attention-grabbing, and it has a low cognitive barrier to entry — even young children with limited reading ability can use it, in line with Sundar.
“The nickname for VR is empathy machine. It could actually generate higher empathy since you’re one with the environment,” he said. “Loss-framed messaging tends to be simpler, more about emotions like fear moderately than hope. Sometimes fear might be higher represented in visually resplendent media like VR.”
Gain-framed messaging, however, tends to involve more interested by the results of motion or inaction for the environment and what humans have to realize, Sundar explained. The movement and interactivity that include VR may distract an excessive amount of from the form of pondering needed to process the potential gains highlighted in that variety of messaging, which is healthier suited to traditional video or text.
“With politicized topics like climate change, individuals are guided by their motivated reasoning, whereby a person readily accepts information consistent with their worldview and ignores or rejects information that’s inconsistent with that view,” Liao said. “Our study suggests that showing stark portrayals of environmental loss might be persuasive in spurring people into motion, to support climate change issues no matter their pre-existing worldviews.”
Pejman Sajjadi, who accomplished the work as a postdoctoral scholar at Penn State and is now with Meta, also contributed to the research.
