Fanning the flames or burning out? Testing competing hypotheses about repeated exposure to threatening climate change messages
Chris Skurka, Jessica Gall Myrick & Yin Yang
Climatic Change volume 176, Article number: 52 (2023) Cite this article
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Abstract
Despite a wealth of scholarship on threat-based climate change messages, most research has examined the effects of a single exposure to them. This is a critical oversight because there are competing claims in public discourse about the benefits or drawbacks of continued exposure to threatening coverage of global warming. In two experiments, we examined whether psychological responses (e.g., emotions, issue salience) intensify or wane with repeated exposure to threatening messages about climate change multiple days in a row. Study 1 examined three consecutive daily exposures to threat-containing news stories about climate change, revealing that fear intensity did not dissipate upon repeated exposures to different threatening articles. Hope was not consistently affected by message exposure, and issue salience was uniformly high. Study 2 involved seven days of messaging exposure, manipulated high- vs. low-threat messaging, and included a wider range of outcomes. Small but significant effects emerged, such that fear and intentions exhibited curvilinear relationships with repeated exposure (increasing initially but plateauing around six exposures) whereas personal issue salience and personal efficacy increased linearly. These over-time trends were not different for high- vs. low-threat messages.
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Concerns about rising sea levels, the destruction of coastal cities, droughts and fires, increasing prevalence of vector-borne illness and heat-related deaths, greater numbers of extreme weather events, and rises in inter-state tensions over dwindling water supplies commonly populate the news media landscape. However, there is a debate about whether this constant barrage of high-threat framing of climate change motivates action or leads to low efficacy, skepticism, denial, and other maladaptive outcomes. For example, when New York Magazine published a cover story in 2017 detailing the worst-case scenarios of climate change inaction (Wallace-Wells 2017), it ignited discussions among scientists, advocates, and lay audiences. While some defended the story’s high-threat tone for its honest journalism and potential to stir audience emotions (Matthews 2017; Roberts 2017), critics argued that “such rhetoric is in many ways as pernicious as outright climate change denial, for it leads us down the same path of inaction” (Mann et al. 2017, para. 3).
At the heart of this debate are questions about the effectiveness of highly threatening media messaging. In particular, much of this debate is implicitly concerned with matters of repeated exposure—that is, how members of the public respond when they encounter this tone of coverage day after day, hour after hour. Does continued exposure to threatening climate news dampen or perhaps amplify feelings of fear? To what extent might it discourage individuals from feeling hopeful about the issue? Will repeated exposure heighten beliefs about the issue’s importance? And does repeated exposure shape one’s willingness to act on this information?
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-023-03539-8
