Psychological inoculation against climate doom

What is it about?

Climate doom is a 'discourse of delay' that falsely suggests there's nothing that can be done to help reduce the consequences of climate change. While climate doom may be intended to motivate action, it may also elicit hopelessness and be perceived as manipulative, ultimately undermining mitigation efforts. Psychological inoculation involves preemptively forewarning people of manipulation and exposing them to weakened dose (examples) of manipulation techniques alongside refutations. Since inoculation has been very effective at improving discernment of manipulative content in other contexts, we ran an online experiment to test whether it can be used to help individuals identify climate doom, and whether it influences reactions towards doom content. To do so, participants scrolled through a simulated social media feed filled with climate doom headlines, non-doom climate headlines and completely unrelated headlines and afterwards rated how manipulative they thought each climate headline was.

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Photo by Javier Miranda on Unsplash

Photo by Javier Miranda on Unsplash

Why is it important?

We found that doom content is perceived as more manipulative than other climate content, and the more manipulative people find doom content the lower their pro-climate intentions. (e.g. eating a vegan diet, recycling). Inoculated participants are better at discerning climate doom content in comparison to regular climate content and also more likely to dislike and flag doom content and less likely to share it, suggesting that inoculation increases identification of, and critical engagement with, doom content.

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