Promoting pro-environmental beliefs and behaviour: choose-your-own story futuristic climate game
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- dc.contributor.author Muradova, Lala
- dc.contributor.author Beauvais, Edana
- dc.date.accessioned 2025-05-30T06:42:32Z
- dc.date.available 2025-05-30T06:42:32Z
- dc.date.issued 2025
- dc.date.updated 2025-05-30T06:42:32Z
- dc.description.abstract How can we address climate scepticism and increase public support for ambitious pro-environmental policies? This study investigates the potential of future-oriented perspective taking, using an innovative and futuristic choose-your-own-adventure narrative game. This cutting-edge intervention involves living in the life of a future self and making choices related to hypothetical climate crises. The choose-your-own-adventure game was integrated into online survey experiments in the United Kingdom (N= 1,738) and the United States (N = 1,290). We found that participation in the game elicited strong emotional responses in individuals, making them more empathetic, but also more hopeless and sad. Imagining their future self during the climate game enhanced people's willingness to engage in future discussions about climate change among the UK respondents. Yet, the intervention did little to transform people's pro-environmental beliefs, policy support, or willingness to sign a climate petition. Causal mediation analyses reveal that these null effects hide important direct and indirect effects. Empathic concern mediates significant positive indirect effect of climate game on people's pro-environmental beliefs, but negative indirect effect on willingness to sign the climate petition. Empathy seems to shape environmental beliefs and behaviours in diverse ways, highlighting the complex and nuanced relationship between them. These findings offer important implications for recent research on the role of emotions in climate change communication, environmental psychology, and policymaking. We also present a unique approach to fostering empathy for the environment and future generations through an engaging choose-your-own-adventure game.
- dc.description.sponsorship This study has been supported by the European Research Council under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No 759736) awarded to SM, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada awarded to EB.
- dc.format.mimetype application/pdf
- dc.identifier.citation Muradova L, Beauvais E. Promoting pro-environmental beliefs and behaviour: choose-your-own story futuristic climate game. PLoS One. 2025;20(3): e317773. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0317773
- dc.identifier.doi http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0317773
- dc.identifier.issn 1932-6203
- dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/10230/70573
- dc.language.iso eng
- dc.publisher Public Library of Science (PLoS)
- dc.relation.ispartof PLoS One. 2025;20(3):e317773
- dc.relation.projectID info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/H2020/759736
- dc.rights © 2025 Muradova, Beauvais. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
- dc.rights.accessRights info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
- dc.rights.uri http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- dc.subject.other Política ambiental
- dc.title Promoting pro-environmental beliefs and behaviour: choose-your-own story futuristic climate game
- dc.type info:eu-repo/semantics/article
- dc.type.version info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion