Framing and Communicating Climate Change: The Effects of Distance and Outcome Frame Manipulations

By Alexa Spence, Nick F. Pidgeon. 2010

771 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Communications regarding climate change are increasingly being utilised in order to encourage sustainable behaviour and the way that these are framed can significantly alter the impact that they have on the recipient. This experimental study seeks to investigate how transferable existing research findings on framing from health and behavioural research are to the climate change case. The study (N = 161) examined how framing the same information about climate change in terms of gain or loss outcomes or in terms of local or distant impacts can affect perceptions. Text on potential climate change impacts was adapted from the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, alongside maps and images of potential flooding impacts. Participants then completed measures of various relevant socio-cognitive factors and questions assessing their responses to the information that they had received. Results indicated that, ceteris paribus, gain frames were superior to loss frames in increasing positive attitudes towards climate change mitigation, and also increased the perceived severity of climate change impacts. However, third variable analyses demonstrated that the superiority of the gain frame was partially suppressed by lower fear responses and poorer information recall within gain framed information. In addition, framing climate change impacts as distant (whilst keeping information presented the same) resulted in climate change impacts being perceived as more severe, while attitudes towards climate change mitigation were more positive when participants were asked to consider social rather than personal aspects of climate change. Implications for designing communications about climate change are outlined.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c525a9aeb2b4f952bb13c535df86294cf428d9d8

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Citations in the corpus

The tools of climate adaptation policy: analysing instruments and instrument selection (2016, background): “Similarly, Spence and Pidgeon (2010) found that a positive ‘gain’ frame, which emphasizes benefits of climate action, is more effective in building support than a negative ‘loss’ frame, which focuses on the costs of failing to act.”
Climate change, natural hazards, and risk perception: the role of proximity and personal experience (2015, result): “With regard to geographic distance, our results are in line with the results of Spence and Pidgeon (2010): people, to a significant degree, think that there will be more climate hazards in the world than in Norway or where they live (Figure 1).”
The Psychological Distance of Climate Change (2012, background): “(35) People also clearly distinguish between personal and societal impacts of climate change, with several studies finding that personal risks of climate change are judged to be lower than societal risks.(12,35) Note that these results are found within respondents in Britain and the United States an”
Personally Relevant Climate Change (2013, background): “However, this finding is incongruent with a recent study which found that geographically local or distant message frames did not differentially alter attitudes toward climate change mitigation (Spence & Pidgeon, 2010).”
Framing Climate Change: Economics, Ideology, and Uncertainty in American News Media Content From 1988 to 2014 (2019, background): “Frames play an essential role in distilling complex topics into more manageable components so that people can identify its relevance and form opinions (Spence and Pidgeon, 2010).”
Investigating the Long-Term Impacts of Climate Change Communications on Individuals’ Attitudes and Behavior (2014, background): “…O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole (2009) found that fear-based climate change representations do not motivate personal engagement with the issue, while Spence and Pidgeon (2010) found that positive framing produced attitudes toward climate change mitigation that were significantly more positive than…”
Educating for resilience: parent and teacher perceptions of children’s emotional needs in response to climate change (2020, background): “Conversations in both home and school should take care to frame discussions in terms of what can be gained rather than lost to promote positive associations with climate action (Spence and Pidgeon 2010).”