Emotions May Not Drive Real Climate Action, Study of 2,000 People Finds

Emotional appeals have long been the backbone of climate communication. Campaigns ask us to feel angry at polluters, compassionate toward those already harmed by rising seas and extreme weather, or hopeful that collective action can still change the trajectory of the planet. The assumption behind these strategies is simple: if people feel strongly enough, they will act. But a new study from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), conducted together with researchers at the University of Warsaw, suggests that this assumption may be far shakier than the environmental movement has believed. When participants were given a genuine opportunity to turn their feelings into action, the emotions stirred by carefully crafted stories made almost no measurable difference in what they actually did.

The research, published in Scientific Reports, examined three climate-related emotions that previous studies had identified as powerful motivators: anger, compassion and hope. Earlier work had shown that angry people are more likely to want to hold so-called climate criminals to account, that compassionate people are inclined to support victims of environmental damage, and that people who feel hopeful about solutions develop stronger intentions to act. Surveys consistently confirm these links. What surveys cannot easily confirm, however, is whether those intentions survive contact with reality, and that is precisely the gap the Norwegian and Polish team set out to close.

To do so, the researchers designed an experiment that went beyond the questionnaire. More than 2,000 participants in Norway and Poland were each given 200 Norwegian kroner or 20 Polish zloty, a modest but real sum of their own money. The participants were then exposed to a series of short stories crafted to trigger different climate-related emotions. Afterward, they were offered a concrete way to act on whatever they felt. They could donate their participation fee to charity, in this case the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF), or they could work through a set of deliberately tedious pattern-finding sheets, with the experimenters donating on their behalf in proportion to the work completed. The second option, which the team calls a real impact task, is what distinguishes this study from most of the existing literature.

The results caught the researchers off guard. Very few participants, hardly any by the team’s own account, gave more money because of the emotional stories they had read, compared with people who had not been exposed to them. The difference in behavior between the emotional conditions and the control was negligible at best. Christian Klöckner, a professor at NTNU’s Department of Psychology who studies why people make environmentally friendly or unfriendly choices, admitted that the team was surprised. The emotional mechanisms that reliably predict stated intentions in surveys simply did not translate into changes in real, costly behavior when put to the test.

This disconnect matters because the field has accumulated a substantial body of evidence showing that emotions do shape attitudes. Klöckner notes that when people are angry, they report stronger motivation and intentions. When people feel a bad conscience, they are more willing to accept climate policies. And hope appears to be a precondition for any engagement at all, since people who believe nothing can be done tend to do nothing. None of that prior evidence is invalidated by the new findings. Instead, the study exposes a fissure between two layers of psychology: the layer where feelings form intentions, and the layer where intentions become behavior. The emotional stories shifted the first layer but left the second essentially untouched.

Klöckner’s earlier work hints that this fissure runs deep. In a separate large-scale project aimed at reducing household energy consumption, his team found that their interventions did in fact lower energy use, yet the participants’ psychological mindsets remained unchanged. The eventual energy savings, he explains, had very little to do with the individuals’ stated intention to save energy. Some people revise their intentions in response to emotional information, while those who make genuine, measurable changes, such as cutting electricity consumption, are not necessarily doing so for the reasons that survey research would predict. The practical lesson is that intention-based measures, the standard currency of environmental psychology, may be poor proxies for the outcomes that actually matter.

For conservation and environmental organizations, the findings arrive at a consequential moment. Non-profits depend heavily on financial contributions from supporters, and understanding what makes people start, stop or continue donating is central to their survival. WWF, which received the donations in this study, openly uses anger, compassion and hope in its fundraising, typically paired with a call to action. Denise Kohn, Senior Corporate Advisor for Partnerships at WWF in Norway, says the organization knows that its financial supporters donate for an average of five to six years, and that any new research shedding light on donor motivation is of genuine interest to the fundraising team.

Kohn also points out that climate itself has proven a difficult fundraising proposition. WWF has never been particularly successful in raising money on climate alone; nature remains a much stronger entry point for donors, and the current political and geopolitical circumstances mean that other crises frequently crowd climate out of public attention. In that sense, the NTNU and Warsaw findings do not simply tell campaigners that emotion fails. They suggest that the emotional architecture of climate engagement is more complicated than a single powerful feeling, and that organizations may need to look beyond one-off emotional appeals if they want to secure durable, behavior-level commitment from their audiences.

The research team is careful not to frame the results as a counsel of despair. Anger, compassion and hope still play vital roles in shaping how people understand climate change, and they likely remain necessary preconditions for engagement even if they are not sufficient on their own. What the study demonstrates is that the motivation behind actual change is more complex than any single overpowering emotion. To untangle that complexity, the team now intends to fund an even larger survey spanning ten countries, aiming to map the differences between people in the intricate patterns of emotional responses to climate change and how those patterns relate to real behavior.

For a field that has leaned heavily on the power of feeling, the message from this experiment is uncomfortable but clarifying. If the goal is to move people from concern to action, the path may run less through the heart than through the messy, contextual, and poorly understood machinery that converts private intention into public behavior. As Klöckner and his colleagues continue their cross-national work, communicators, campaigners and policymakers may need to treat emotional storytelling not as a lever that reliably moves behavior, but as one ingredient in a far more complicated recipe, one that this new line of research is only beginning to write down.

Subject of Research: The impact of anger, compassion and hope on pro-environmental behavior and climate action

Article Title: The negative effect of emotion in climate action

Article References: The negative effect of emotion in climate action. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: climate action, emotion, anger, compassion, hope, pro-environmental behavior, donations, NTNU, University of Warsaw, climate psychology, behavioral research, WWF