Strategic Communication for Pro-Environmentalism: Is Political Polarisation Reduced by Environmental Messages that Emphasise Conservative Worldviews?

Research indicates that framing environmental messaging to be congruent with conservative worldviews may be effective in appealing to more conservative people and thus attenuate political polarisation on pro-environmentalism. The present studies used open science practices to test the reliability of the positive effects of this communication strategy on pro-environmentalism. Specifically, I replicated and extended two key lines of research using temporal comparisons or moral foundations in environmental messaging. In Chapters 1 and 2, respectively, I presented an overview of the present thesis and literature reviews about four conservative worldviews in relation to pro-environmentalism, environmental messaging incorporating conservative worldviews, and open science. In Chapter 3, I directly replicated research by Baldwin and Lammers (2016) in two studies (Studies 1 and 2). In particular, the experimental studies in Chapter 3 investigated whether past-focused environmental messaging (e.g., “looking back to our nation’s past, I think that our society has gone too far in its desire for material wealth”) is more effective in enhancing more conservative people’s message endorsement and pro-environmental attitudes, compared with future-focused messaging. In Chapter 4, I shifted the focus to binding moral foundations − loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and purity/degradation morals – as an alternative environmental framing. Specifically, I first validated environmental messages incorporating distinct binding morals, then experimentally tested whether these environmental messages alleviated the negative association between political conservatism and pro-environmentalism (conservation intentions and willingness to receive more information about environmental protection), relative to a control condition (Study 3). Across all three high-powered and pre-registered studies, there was no evidence that environmental messaging emphasising conservative worldviews (i.e., messaging focusing on either the past or binding morals) appealed to more conservative people. Thus, changing the framing of environmental messages was unable to reduce the political polarisation on pro-environmentalism. Results challenged the effectiveness of the communication strategy emphasising conservative worldviews on promoting conservatives’ pro-environmentalism and highlighted the importance of conducting replications following open science practices. Future research should explore other effective communication strategies for attenuating the political polarisation on pro-environmentalism.