Mobilizing Climate Action with Moral Appeals: An 8-1 Weeks Field-Experiment with a Climate Action App

Effective climate change mitigation requires profound lifestyle changes and citizens’ support for transformational climate policies. We present here a comprehensive, highly granular, field-experiment dataset of people’s daily, real-life behaviours measured in CO2e across six domains as well as their civic and political behaviour. The data was collected over eight weeks via a bespoke smartphone app and is enriched by people’s daily reflections on their change trajectories and by data on political leaning, emotions, agency, socio-demographics, values, attitudes and social norm. The pre-registered study shows that exposing people to moral appeals results in carbon footprint reduction, although not in all domains, and in greater civic and political engagement. The data also reveals that, covariates such as values, political leaning and agency, affect the outcomes and the effect of the treatment. Importantly, we find that moral appeals can mobilise people leaning politically to the centre and right too.