Climate Fiction, Real Impact: Causal Evidence for Narrative Climate Content's Longitudinal Effect

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Abstract

Featuring climate content on screen is believed to be a highly efficient strategy for shifting audiences’ climate beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. With this objective, major studios and other media organizations have launched initiatives to increase the prevalence of climate content. Despite various psychological theories proposed for how climate content may influence beliefs resulting in climate action, many studies assessing the empirical evidence for this pathway rely on cross-sectional analyses with severely limited causal attribution and nearly all studies only measure the impact at a single point in time, limiting our understanding of the persistence of any estimated impact. In this study, we address these limitations through a longitudinal randomized controlled trial (N = 1,014), estimating the impact of watching narrative climate content (a climate focused episode of the television series Madam Secretary) on a set of climate beliefs and attitudes, including belief in climate change, endorsement of government action, social norms around climate action, and other drivers of personal action. These measures were assessed at baseline, as well as three later points (immediately post-viewing, 3-5 days post-viewing, and 7-10 days post-viewing). We find that watching narrative climate content can significantly increase pro-climate beliefs and attitudes. While these positive changes tend to decline across time, they often persist 7-10 days post-viewing. This finding lends credible causal evidence for the claim that on-screen narrative climate fiction has the power to shift relevant climate beliefs and attitudes, even significantly post-viewership, and may be an effective tool supporting large scale social change towards climate action.

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