Telling Stories: How To Motivate Climate Action
We’re failing to engage the public in climate change because we’ve been telling the wrong stories. That can change.
How can the public get more excited about taking action on climate change? This is the age-old question facing environmental journalists, scientists and others keen on building engagement on the preeminent challenge of the 21st century.
How is it possible that less than one per cent of all television network news coverage in the United States last year focused on climate change? That coverage actually saw a significant decrease from 2022 to 2023?
That less than 10 per cent of Americans talk about climate change with family and friends often, a figure that has not changed substantially in a decade of data-gathering?
Clearly the challenge comes down to communication.
Information deficit model
The traditional way of relaying the causes, consequences and impacts of the climate emergency has been through an information deficit model of communication. The supposition is that if the public only knew what scientists did they would act upon the problem. So, just give them more information.
That supposition was famously tested by Yale Law School professor Dan Kahan in 2012. Kahan found that scientific literacy was inversely related to perceptions of climate risk. In other words, the more someone was up-to-speed about the scientific causes and consequences of climate change, the less they were concerned about it. This held especially true for more conservative audiences.
This is not to say that there is no role for clearly communicating scientific information about climate change. Though instilling fear with narratives of doom and gloom is not always the best approach either.
In 2014–15, a team of researchers at Yale and George Mason University found a significant effect when survey groups were told a simple scientific truth: that 97 per cent of the world’s scientists think climate change is happening and that it is caused by humans. That simple message about the scientific consensus increased the subsequent correct estimates of the consensus by as much as 20 per cent.
Facts matter. Especially ones that are easy to understand and that reflect consensus.
Engaging the heart to stoke the brain
But an even better way of communicating climate science is through what Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky describe as the ‘System 1’ brain in the book, Thinking Fast and Slow. System 1 is the heuristic part of our cognition. It’s the part that reasons instinctively, through gut feelings, instincts and intuition. It’s the part that feels, without doing too much thinking.
This is the cognitive function that needs to be activated first and foremost in communicating climate science. Politicians are masterful storytellers and know exactly what to say to stoke emotions like patriotism, nostalgia or fear. Some have weaponized the power of emotion.
Scientists, journalists and climate change communicators obviously can’t play fast and loose with the facts for effect. But they can draw up on System 1 thinking to engage the System 2 brain. In other words, they can use the power of the story to jumpstart the brain out of its cognitive laziness.
Enlightenment-era thinking, which constitutes the foundation of modernity and late capitalism, has relied on the notion that the ‘sum of all facts’ (i.e., logical reasoning) is the roadblock of economic development.
Trouble is, the human brain is wired to think first through feelings, emotion — stories — and only then through facts, data and technical analyses.
The challenge, then, is to activate the heuristic, System 1 brain function, and then to stoke the more analytical System 2 function — and, of course, to tell the truth in doing so.
The question is how to most effectively do this.
Telling stories to engage emotions
The world is awash in information and technology. Social media apps, video conferencing tools, and now, language models powered by artificial intelligence, are reshaping the way we communicate.
Yet, as the renowned public opinion researcher Anthony Leiserowitz observes, the most effective form of human communication is what our ancestors did millennia ago: sitting around the fire telling stories.
There are several techniques to tell better stories about the environment, even climate change.
These include, of course, engaging in the emotions of the audience.
But just as important is the importance of developing strong characters and stoking the imagination of readers, listeners and viewers. Science fiction writers like Kim Stanley Robinson do a formidable job building lifeworlds that paint the picture of a collective climate reality without being off-putting or standoffish.
Even authors of children’s literature are using storytelling as a tool for telling climate-fiction narratives.
In A Cloud Called Bhura, young adult author Bijal Vachharajani paints the picture of climate dystopia as Mumbai is cloaked in a perpetual cloud of pollution (Bhura means greyish-brown in Hindi). This is no Jetsons though; she never loses sight of that kernel of hope the children have to address the very-real crisis in their city.
The mobilizing role of conflict narratives
One often overlooked storytelling tool is conflict.
We tend to see conflict as demobilizing and paralyzing. For example, you often hear people saying the news is too negative or gloomy, or that it turns them off. While conflict narratives, themes or frames can indeed induce cynicism and apathy, when told properly, they can also activate a very powerful sense of collective and mobilization.
Think back to the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s or protests in New York by LGBT activists for access to AIDS medications in the 1980s or, more recently, the struggle for women’s rights in Iran.
None of these struggles would have found lift without an element of conflict; a cause worth fighting for.
Thus, conflict narratives — what sociologist Dorceta Taylor calls collective action frames — focused around addressing some kind of injustice or wrongdoing can very effectively induce the public toward action.
This company wants to build a mine in our community that will pollute our sacred lake? Hell no!
The most effective way of increasing the tip count if you run a coffee shop? Stick a few five dollar bills in the tip jar.
Similarly, showing how people in your community are doing things that you can relate to and that feel normal, important or desirable, are among the most under-utilized forms of pro-environmental communication.
Instilling pro-environmental values
Social psychologist Shalom H. Schwartz famously produced a list of 10 universal human values that each person has to some degree or another. They include universalism and benevolence on one end, and self-direction and stimulation on the other.
It is hardly surprising that the correlation between the values of benevolence (thinking about others) and universalism (welfare of all) and pro-environmental attitudes, beliefs and behaviours is incredibly strong. People who think beyond themselves and who are concerned about the greater good are far more likely to also be concerned about protecting the environment.
So, one other highly effective and important way of promoting pro-environmental values and beliefs is to instil the idea of benevolence and universalism in our society.
But what do advertising, reality television shows, corporate culture, or even the news media do instead? Instil the idea that moving up the corporate ladder, acquiring more consumer products and looking out for #1 are the key to happiness and success.
We live in a society that is highly polarized. It is each person for themselves, and each tribe for itself. But what if we could borrow from the techniques employed by conflict moderators to better understand what the other side wants? To bring the ‘two sides’ together — with an eye on solutions?
Some journalists are actively picking up this work.
It isn’t a stretch to go from putting yourself in the shoes of the ‘other side’ to understand where they are coming from, and to thinking about an all-of-society approach to our toughest problems.
It was not all that long ago that we had this kind of more gentle, universalist world. Remember, “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country”? We should, and must ask the same of our planet — and telling better stories is that all-important first step.
