Feeling Beats Facts: Emotion Emerges as the Strongest Lever in Climate Communication

Every year, governments, environmental agencies and non-governmental organisations pour millions of dollars, francs and euros into campaigns designed to persuade people to act on climate change. Posters urge citizens to fly less, television spots warn of rising seas, and social media feeds fill with charts of shrinking glaciers. Yet a fundamental question has long haunted the field: which of these messages actually work? A new large-scale synthesis from the University of Geneva offers one of the most comprehensive answers to date, and its central conclusion is striking. When it comes to moving people from awareness to action, emotion appears to matter more than information alone.

The study, led by Tobias Brosch, director of the Consumer Decision and Sustainable Behavior Lab at UNIGE’s Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences and the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, together with postdoctoral researcher Mario Herberz, is published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology. Rather than running a single experiment, the team conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis, a statistical technique that pools the results of many independent studies to reveal patterns no individual investigation could detect on its own. The researchers analysed 71 studies examining the impact of specific climate communication strategies, drawing on data from a total of 216,000 participants in Switzerland and abroad. This scale makes it the first large-scale synthesis of its kind in the domain of climate action messaging.

The scope of the analysis was deliberately broad. The 71 studies encompassed 15 distinct communication approaches, spanning the full spectrum of what campaigners currently deploy in the field. At one end sat purely informational strategies, which aim to fill knowledge gaps by presenting scientific facts about global warming, its causes and its consequences. At the other end sat emotionally oriented approaches, including storytelling and messages designed to evoke a sense of wonder or awe at the beauty of nature. In between lay strategies grounded in the principle of bounded rationality, a concept from behavioural economics which holds that human decision-making is limited by attention, time and cognitive capacity. These approaches do not try to persuade through argument but instead facilitate choices by highlighting specific, personally relevant aspects of climate change, such as its consequences for health or household finances.

The headline finding is, in one sense, reassuring for communicators: almost all of these strategies are likely to have a positive effect. According to Brosch, the synthesis shows that the vast majority of approaches improve people’s intentions and behaviours, as well as their support for climate policies. In other words, the question facing campaign designers is rarely whether a given message will help, but how much it will help. Given that the studies reviewed mainly measured the effects of messages to which people were exposed only once, the authors note that this is particularly encouraging, since repeated exposure, as occurs in sustained campaigns, can be expected to strengthen the impact of effective messages over time.

But the meta-analysis also revealed a clear hierarchy among the strategies, and this is where the practical implications become sharpest. Campaigns that evoke a strong emotional response were found to be significantly more effective than those that simply present facts and scientific evidence. Two emotional routes stood out in particular. The first is storytelling, in which narratives carry the audience through experiences rather than at them, allowing listeners to feel the stakes of climate change rather than merely read about them. The second is the evocation of wonder or awe at the beauty of nature, an emotion that appears to connect people to the very thing at stake in climate action: landscapes, ecosystems and species worth preserving.

A third, closely related family of high-performing messages draws on moral, ethical or even religious considerations. These framings highlight humanity’s connection to something greater than itself, a natural world that people have a responsibility to preserve for future generations and for its own sake. The effectiveness of such messages suggests that climate communication resonates most deeply when it engages the values and identities that people already hold, rather than attempting to construct persuasion from raw data. Facts, in this picture, are not useless; they are simply insufficient on their own to overcome the psychological distance that many people feel from a global, slow-moving problem.

One strategy family, however, failed to deliver. Messages built on individual and collective responsibility, exemplified by slogans such as ‘success depends largely on you’, showed little or no effect on intentions, behaviour or policy support. Worse, the researchers note that such messages may even foster reactance, the well-documented psychological phenomenon in which people respond to perceived pressure or blame by digging in their heels and doing the opposite of what is asked. Guilt-oriented appeals that place the entire burden of a planetary problem on a single person’s shoulders appear, at least in the aggregated evidence, to be a dead end for campaigners.

The synthesis also yielded a more modest but actionable insight: messages are more effective when they include images. Visual content, whether photographs of melting ice or sweeping natural landscapes, appears to amplify the persuasive power of accompanying text. This aligns with the broader emotional findings, since imagery is a particularly direct route to affective response. For public authorities and organisations with limited communication budgets, the combination of narrative, emotional framing and strong visuals represents the most evidence-backed recipe currently available.

The timing of these findings matters. As Brosch observes, the scientific evidence on climate change is now well established, and the central challenge is no longer generating knowledge but turning knowledge into action. The gap between what people know and what they do, sometimes called the knowledge-action gap, has persisted for decades despite ever-clearer reports from the scientific community. The Geneva results suggest that closing this gap requires communicators to stop treating audiences as information deficits to be filled and start treating them as emotional, moral and social beings whose behaviour is shaped by feelings, stories and values. At a time when the stakes of climate inaction continue to rise, the researchers conclude that there is considerable scope to improve climate communication, and the evidence now points clearly toward where that improvement should begin: with the heart as much as the head.

Subject of Research: The effectiveness of different communication strategies in promoting climate action

Article Title: To promote climate action, emotion matters more than information

Article References: To promote climate action, emotion matters more than information. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: climate change, climate communication, meta-analysis, emotion, storytelling, behavior change, environmental psychology, University of Geneva, bounded rationality, public campaigns, knowledge-action gap, policy support