Episode Notes:

 

The following articles were referenced during today’s episode:

Chapman, D.A., Corner, A., Webster, R., & Markowitz, E.M. (2016). Climate visuals: A mixed methods investigation of public perceptions of climate images in three countries. Global Environmental Change, 41(2016): 172–182

 

Lehman, B., Thompson, J., Davis, S., & Carlson, J.M. (2019). Affective images of climate change. Frontiers in Psychology, 10: 690

 

Leviston, Z., Price, J., & Bishop, B. (2014). Imagining climate change: The role of implicit associations and affective psychological distancing in climate change responses. European Journal of Social Psychology, 44: 441–454

 

Metag, J., Füchslin, T., Schäfer, M.S., & Kleinen-von Königslöw, K. (2016). Perceptions of climate change imagery: Evoked salience and self-efficacy in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. Science Communication, 38(2): 197-227

 

O’Neill, S.J., Boykoff, M., Niemeyer, S., & Day, S.A. (2013). On the use of imagery for climate change engagement. Global Environmental Change, 23 (2013): 413–421

 

Music for this episode was Lazy Day, by Audionautix, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution lisence  (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). See more music from Audionautix at http://audionautix.com/

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The two photo databases referenced during today’s episode were Climate Visuals and Affective Climate Images.

 

If you have questions, comments, or suggested readings related today’s episode, or you want to suggest a topic for future episodes, you can email me at Carla.Bamesberger@colostate.edu or connect with me on Twitter @Ziexyam.

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Episode transcript:

 

Welcome to RESEARCHED, an independent podcast that both demystifies research and attempts to synthesize existing research on a selected topic.

 

I’m your host, Carla Bamesberger.

 

Today, we’re taking a look at people’s perceptions of climate change images in order to understand how we can communicate about these topics more effectively.

 

Climate change tends to be a fairly abstract issue. For most people, many of its impacts are invisible without ready access to tools and data sets that track change over time. Because of its invisibility, it’s difficult for people to conceptualize risks associated with climate change. As a result, they form risk perceptions based on dominant cultural discourse and personal and social values. That means that communicators trying to raise awareness or encourage sustainable actions or behaviors have their work cut out for them.

 

A considerable amount of climate change communication uses visuals to convey information and be more impactful. And it’s no wonder. It’s no mystery that images are a powerful communication tool.

 

There is an abundance of media effects research and other research showing that visual content has a strong influence on people’s individual perception and understanding of a topic. Sociocultural factors, prior knowledge, and personal beliefs also play a role.

 

I’ve selected five academic journal articles spanning from 2013 to 2019 that examine viewer response to and associations with climate change imagery. These five papers do not make up all of the research that is out there on this topic. As awesome as it would be, it is not practical cover all of the literature on this topic extensively in one reasonably lengthed podcast episode.

 

The selected papers are well researched, published in academic journals, and use sensible and well understood methods. For brevity, I won’t delve too deeply into describing the methods of each study. Each study is linked to in the episode description, or you can email me with any questions.

 

Before we dive in, I wanted to make note of three things:

 

The first is that None of the studies selected for today’s episode measure the impact of visuals that show change over time. I don’t know if this is because I didn’t come across them, or if this shows what is called a literature gap, or a specific topic with few existing studies.

 

The second note I wanted to make is that these studies focus primarily on photographic visuals instead of other types of visuals such as videos, infographics, or comics.

 

I also wanted to make a note on name pronunciation. As a person with an easily mispronounced name, which is NOT pronounced bam-berger or bamesberger, I know that it can be annoying when someone says your name wrong. I do my best to pronounce people’s names correctly, but sometimes I’m not cued in on the nuances of phonetics. I apologize in advance if I end up mispronouncing any researcher names.

 

With that, let’s roll into our first study.

 

STUDIES

 

We’ll start with Leviston, Price, and Bishop’s 2014 study called Imagining climate change: The role of implicit associations and affective psychological distancing in climate change responses, published in the European Journal of Social Psychology.

 

Leviston, Price, and Bishop point out that negative climate change imagery is often thought to distance people from the issue and reduce their sense of being able to do anything about the problem, commonly referred to as efficacy. They wanted to measure people’s actual associations with climate change imagery and the affective, or emotional, connections that these images had. Other research before this looked at the affect, or emotional reaction that certain images provoked. Leviston, Price, and Bishop felt that it was also important to note the level of arousal, or activation that a person felt in addition to measuring affect.

 

They noted fear, anger, and guilt as being high-arousal responses, and powerlessness, despair, and confusion as being low-arousal responses.

 

 To measure this, they conducted two studies, both in Australia.

 

For the first study, they conducted a survey to find out what mental images Australians associate with climate change.

 

They found that common mental image associations with climate change include rising sea levels, melting ice caps, drought, and floods. People tended to refer to events, and more general, remote images more often than local impacts. The researchers noted that the flooding imagery was likely more prominent in people’s minds, or salient, because of recent flooding events in parts of Australia.

 

For affective associations, 14 of the most common image associations evoked negative feelings, with melting ice, deserts, and smokestacks receiving the highest negative scores.

 

For study 2, the researchers compiled a collection of photos based on the results of study 1. They showed these images to a new group of participants and had them rate each image on association level with climate change and on affect. Discussion group sessions followed the ranking portion.

 

Six theme categories emerged from the discussion group data: Disasters and extremes, icons and ice, climate solutions and leadership, pollution, drought and denuded landscape, and missing images.

 

Disasters and extremes were some of the top images that participants associated with climate change. These images were ranked as having high negative affect, and high arousal. The most commonly discussed disaster image was one depicting brush fire in Victoria, Australia. The most commonly selected disaster image was one of flooding in Sydney, which was also a notably fake looking image. (It’s interesting that people tended to pick this fake image. Participants in another of today’s selected studies notably did not like staged or fake looking images).

 

Icon and ice images were the most commonly selected images associated with climate change. These images consistently ranked as having negative affect and moderate to high arousal.

 

Participants frequently selected an image of a polar bear on melting ice, but felt that this image was fairly cliché. The second most common image in this group depicted a collapsing ice shelf, followed by maps of ice caps. Ice imagery was seen as both a distant issue and a local issue due to local flooding and coastal erosion concerns.

 

Images that fell under the second theme, drought and denuded landscape, were the least commonly selected images of the study. The researchers note that this is interesting because these issues are the most relevant to climate impacts in Australia. These images received the lowest arousal ratings, and participants felt that these were not related to climate change.

 

Images of pollution, the third theme, were frequently selected by participants. These images were consistently rated with negative affect and high arousal. Participants also described that these images were disempowering. The most common image from this group were smokestacks, though there was some debate on the connection between smokestacks and climate change.

 

The fourth theme was climate solutions and leadership. These images tended to rate as having positive affect. The most commonly selected images in this theme included energy solutions and politicians, with wind farms and solar powers appearing most often and being described as showing a solution to a problem. Politicians were rarely selected, though certain green figure heads such as Al Gore were occasionally selected.

 

For the final theme, missing images, the researchers asked participants what climate change imagery they felt was missing from the set. These included human contributions to climate change, stunted crops, food riots, flooding, graphs and charts, and impacts on indigenous people.

 

Several key findings came out of this study:

With the exception of pictures showing drought and denuded landscapes, nearly all of the imagery showing climate impacts received negative affective ratings. Similarly, images of disasters and extremes received high arousal rankings. Participants felt that these images made them want to take action, suggesting that they did not decrease a sense of efficacy.

 

Images of flooding and brushfire were commonly selected, possibly because these events were relevant in recent Australian history, which might have made these issues easier to associate with personal risk.

 

Images showing causes of climate change also had negative affect, but recieved lower arousal ratings than the impacts imagery.

 

Images of solutions and climate leaders had positive affect ratings and high arousal.  

 

Participants also tended to select images prominently featured in media covering climate change.

 

Today’s second article, titled On the use of imagery for climate change engagement, was authored by O’Neil, Baykoff, Niemeyer, and Day in 2013 and published in the journal Global Environmental Change.

 

These researchers wanted to explore how people interact with climate change imagery, something that had not received much attention in climate change imagery studies prior to 2013.

 

Their study took place in three countries: the United States, the United Kingdoms, and Australia.

 

Interestingly, they saw similar results across all three countries and suggested that this might indicate a dominant mainstream global discourse on climate change. It should be noted, however, that they conducted their studies in English-speaking countries. That means that rather than reflecting a global discourse, it is possible that these findings could suggest a dominant mainstream discourse on Climate Change in English-speaking countries instead.

 

The researchers designed an experiment where participants were given a collection of photos. They were asked to sort these images based on how personally important the image made climate change feel, termed salience, and on how capable of taking action the image made them feel, termed efficacy. After the sorting process, participants were interviewed about their choices.

 

First, let’s take a look at the results for salience.

 

The images ranked most consistently across the three countries as being most salient depicted climate change impacts. The highest ranked image in this category was of flooding. Other highly ranked images include ice sheets, deforestation, polar bears, cracked ground, and coral reefs. Participants also consistently ranked images depicting smokestacks, temperature graphs, and traffic jams as highly salient. Some impacts imagery consistently ranked low, including coastal erosion and brushfire.

 

The images most consistently ranked as least salient across the three countries were images of identifiable people (which tended to be politicians and climate leaders). Participants described feeling like the people pictured were not related to climate change, or that selected climate leaders might be hypocritical in their behavior.

 

Now, let’s take a look at the efficacy results.

 

The images that promoted a sense of efficacy were not as consistent across the three countries as the salience images were. The most highly ranked efficacy images across the three countries tended to depict energy futures. Images depicting lifestyle choices such as showing people making sustainable choices also consistently ranked high for efficacy. This theme also included images of protests, which had mixed results as some participants didn’t feel that this was related to climate change or felt that this imagery did not align with their lifestyle or values.

 

Country-based differences in efficacy ratings showed up in images of identifiable people. Australian participants ranked these images low for efficacy, while United States and United Kingdom participants ranked them slightly higher.

 

Efficacy related to climate impact imagery also varied by country, with participants from the United States and United Kingdoms ranking these images lower for efficacy than Australian participants.

 

This study produced 3 key findings:

The first is that images depicting climate change impacts enhanced climate change salience but decreased feelings of efficacy. This is similar to findings from Leviston, Price, and Bishop, who also found that impact imagery evoked more climate change associations. However, these researchers felt that participants felt more empowered by these images. Unlike the current study, however, Leviston, Price, and Bishop were not specifically measuring efficacy when they made this observation.

 

The second key finding is that images depicting energy futures evoked a sense of increased efficacy. Participants felt empowered to take action after viewing these images. Unfortunately, these images also decreased salience, meaning that they undermined people’s sense of urgency regarding climate change.

 

The third key finding is that images of political figures undermined climate change salience. In the Australian groups, these images also undermined feelings of efficacy. These findings may be similar to findings from Leviston, Price, and Bishop, who reported that political images and climate leader images were not frequently selected. Their study also found, however, that when these images were selected, they inspired positive feelings.

 

O’Neil, Baykoff, Niemeyer, and Day conclude that few images seem to both increase climate change salience and support feelings of efficacy. They suggest that this may be an either-or situation. Climate change communications may need to focus on imagery that increases awareness and a sense of urgency about climate change, or prompts action, but not both.

 

Our third article, titled Perceptions of climate change imagery: Evoked salience and self-efficacy in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, published in 2016 in the journal Science Communication, is highly related the study we just looked at. If you’re familiar with research, then you know that repeating experiments, called replication, is an important part of the process. It can show if the previous results were a coincidence, and whether those results apply to other contexts.

 

The authors of this study, Metag, Füchslin, Schäfer, and Kleinen-von Königslöw, replicated the experiment in the O’Neil, Baykoff, Niemeyer, and Day study. They conducted theirs in Germany, Switzerland, and Australia.

 

Since they repeated the same experiment, we can launch right into the results without describing the experiment again.

 

Interestingly, this study also saw similarities in results across the three countries, and their results were similar to the previous study as well. This could mean that just as O’Neil, Baykoff, Niemeyer, and Day suggested, there may be a dominant global discourse about climate change that extends beyond English-speaking countries.

 

These researchers organized their images into five visual themes: images of climate impacts and threats, nature themes, people or talking heads (which included identifiable people like politicians, but also victims and protestors), graphs and models, and carbon emissions and energy issues.

 

Here are their salience results:

Images depicting climate change impacts were ranked high for salience. This especially applied to images showing an individual person at risk, and images of flooding. Other high-salience images included polar bears and drought.

 

Recognizable images distributed by climate change media ranked low-salience, as did images of political leaders and churches. Some images depicting behavior changes that abstractly connected to climate change such as installing housing insulation also ranked low-salience.

 

Images depicting causes of climate change tended to rank as high-salience, including smokestacks, traffic jams, and coal power. Snow images ranked with low salience.  

 

Now let’s switch to the efficacy results:

 

Images depicting renewable energies, sustainable habits, carbon emissions, mobility, and travel ranked highest for efficacy. The images that received the lowest efficacy ratings included climate impacts, polar bears, scientific images, and statistics, as well as images used prominently in climate change media.

 

These findings had some key similarities and differences with the original study.

 

Just like the original, images showing climate change impacts were ranked highest for salience, and images of climate solutions, which also included transportation in this study, ranked highest for efficacy.

 

Contrary to O’Neil and company’s study, respondents in this study did not experience a decreased sense of efficacy when observing protest imagery.

 

Another set of notable differences relates to regional differences in specific climate imagery.  Coral reefs ranked low for efficacy and salience, suggesting that this type of imagery might be more effective in areas like Australia where coral reefs are more relevant. Images depicting forests and deforestation were ranked more highly in these countries than in the United States, the United Kingdoms, or Australia, possibly reflecting more region-specific issues as well. Images of flooding, however, had similar results between the two studies.  

 

The findings of this study support O’Neil and company’s conclusion that climate images are more likely to either enhance climate change salience or promote efficacy, but not offer both outcomes. This calls back to O’Neil and company’s suggestion that climate change communicators need to choose imagery based on their desired outcomes. These findings also add something new to O’Neil and company’s findings. They suggest that certain climate change images may be more relevant to and thus more effective in some cultural contexts than others due to geographic and cultural differences.

 

Our next study is an exploratory study from Chapman, Corner, Webster, and Markowitz, titled Climate visuals: A mixed methods investigation of public perceptions of climate images in three countries. It was published in 2016 in the journal Global Environmental Change. The goal of their research was to create a database of climate change visuals. To do this, they investigated people’s attitudes, affective (or emotional) responses, and behavioral responses to issues represented by photographs.

 

These researchers conducted group discussions in Germany and the United Kingdoms, and an international online survey in Germany, the United Kingdoms, and the United States.

 

Results from the discussion groups were organized into three major themes: The importance of depicting credible and authentic human subjects, critical response to cliché images and protest imagery, and complexities of localized images.

 

Under importance of depicting credible and authentic human subjects, respondents felt that it was important for images to depict credible and authentic human subjects. Images depicting individual people were more powerful, though images showing groups of people reduced the impact. Eye contact with an individual subject, or images showing an individual in distress also made more of an impact.

 

Notably, photos involving human subjects that looked staged or posed were considered to be the least effective of the human images. Participants felt skeptical of these and connected staged images with the concept of selling an idea.

 

Images of individual political figures also tended to be considered least effective and inspired more skepticism than other photos. This finding is consistent with similar findings from O’Neil, Baykoff, Niemeyer, and Day, where participants felt that political figures and climate leaders might be hypocritical.

 

In critical response to cliché images and protest imagery, participants felt like common climate imagery such as polar bears, melting ice, a burning globe, fire, pollution, and coal energy were cliché, with some participants viewing them as non-persuasive. Other participants felt that these cliché images were persuasive, especially images of polar bears. Images depicting cracked earth and starving people were viewed as ineffective as well, mostly due to pre-existing associations between these images and third-world countries.

 

An important finding regarding the cliché images was that participants felt that these images helped them understand climate change better.

 

Protest imagery was viewed as non-persuasive due to overuse, and some participants couldn’t connect protest behaviors with their own lifestyle or values. Some participants also expressed concerns of bandwagoning. These findings echo what participants in O’Neil, Baykoff, Niemeyer, and Day’s study said about protest imagery.

 

In the theme complexities of localized images, localized images designed to negate the effects of psychological distancing of climate change issues produced a range of reactions. Some participants felt that showing local images of climate change trivialized the issue, or made it seem like the image was trying to make their local issues more important than climate impacts in other areas. A consistent result was that participants tended to worry about the impacts of climate change on poor areas or other countries, with participants not typically associating serious climate risks with their local area.

 

Survey results were organized into six categories: Emotional response, motivation to change behavior and support policy, motivation to share images with others, understanding of images and motivation to seek more information, and country-level differences.

 

In emotional response, image content significantly impacted emotion. Consistent with the other studies we’ve discussed, climate change solutions sparked mostly positive affect, while images of climate change impacts and causes inspired negative affect.

 

For the second theme, motivation to change behavior and support policy, impact imagery was more likely to affect motivation for behavioral change and policy support. Images showing causes or solutions scored lower in behavior change and policy support.

 

Under motivation to share images with others, impact imagery was more likely to motivate people to share an image, and solutions imagery was the least likely to do so. Climate change impacts were also the highest scoring images in this category.

 

As for country-level differences, German respondents tended to have the highest reactivity to the images presented to them, such as experiencing stronger affective responses or being more willing to make behavioral changes. Respondents from the United Kingdoms tended to have the lowest reactivity to the images.

 

In the final theme, image type and climate change skepticism, respondents who indicated feeling skeptical about the existence of climate change gave less environmental responses to images depicting causes or impacts than other images.   

 

In their conclusion, Chapman, Corner, Webster, and Markowitz recommend pairing images of climate impacts with images of solutions when communicating about climate change. They also recommend using caution when choosing images of local climate impacts so that the selected images appropriately convey the seriousness of the issue without trivializing it. Finally, they recommend contextualizing unique climate change images using cliché images in order to increase salience and understanding. They also compiled a database of climate change photographs, available at ClimateVisuals.org

 

The final article for today’s episode is titled Affective images of climate change, written by Lehman, Thompson, Davis, and Carlson, published in 2019 in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. Like Chapman, Corner, Webster, and Markowitz, these researchers wanted to produce a well-informed database of climate change photos that will be most relevant and effective in climate change communication, which can be found at affectiveclimateimages.weebly.com.

 

Unlike the Climate Visuals study, Lehman, Thompson, Davis, and Carlson focus on the relevance and effectiveness of images. They also measure emotional arousal and affect related to positive or negative feelings.

 

The top 10% of photos rated by participants as being relevant to climate change include images of polar bears, ice floes, industrial smog, and natural disasters. Participants who scored high environmental beliefs scores were the most likely to rate these images as being the most relevant. The 10% least relevant photos included images of landscapes, buildings, and people. Participants with the highest environmental beliefs scores were also more likely to rate these images as being the least relevant.

 

They found that images rated as relevant to climate change were also rated as being the most emotionally arousing. These images were also consistently rated as evoking negative affect. Similarly, images that were rated as most arousing received negative affect scores.

 

Images containing human subjects tended to score low for relevance. Another notable result is that images of climate impacts and causes received higher relevance ratings than images showing solutions, but solitons imagery consistently ranked in the top 50% of the images ranked as relevant.

 

Based on these findings, Lehman, Thompson, Davis, and Carlson suggest that the imagery that increases climate change salience tends to be alarming and upsetting, which is consistent with the findings of the other articles selected for today’s episode. They also suggest that polar bear images, which came up in most of the other articles as well, are considered cliché, but help people understand climate change. Finally, they suggest that while showing solutions seems to be important, people consider images of climate change effects and causes to be more relevant to climate change than images depicting solutions.

 

These five studies show that choosing effective climate change images is not a straightforward task. Nevertheless, they do provide some important insights that could help to inform effective communication today. Before I close out this episode, I wanted to pull out a few key takeaways from these articles.

 

Images depicting climate change impacts and causes tend to feel more relevant to climate change and tend to make this issue feel more important. These images might be most useful to communicators who want to make climate change a more salient issue. However, these images may also undermine efficacy, making people less likely to take action.

 

Cultural and regional context may impact the effectiveness of certain types of images as well. Some images, such as pollution, natural disasters, and energy solutions, seem to be considered relevant in multiple countries. Some images, however, may be more or less relevant in certain areas. Images of dying coral reefs, for example, may be more affective in coastal regions than land-locked ones. Similarly, regions experiencing specific types of events such as fire or flooding may respond better to images of those events.

 

Solutions and behavior change imagery makes people feel more positive and capable of taking action. Unfortunately, people might have trouble making connections between these images and climate change. Including more context with such images could help with these connections.

 

Images of protests and recognizable figures such as politicians has mixed results and should be used with caution. These types of images were reported as empowering and relevant, but also had the opposite effect of alienating people.

 

There are several types of images that people most commonly associate with climate change, including pollution, natural disasters, energy solutions, coal energy, melting ice, and polar bears. These common associations may suggest a dominant global dialogue about climate change. These images were considered cliché, but helped people to understand climate change. It is possible that combining these images with less cliché ones could be more effective than avoiding or overusing them.

 

Overall, it is important to consider your desired outcome when planning climate imagery. These studies suggest that no one image can both make climate change feel more important and make people more likely to take action. It is possible that combining different types of images could more effectively produce desirable outcomes that inspire action and increase salience. These studies do not investigate the impact of combinations of images, or of images combined with words.

 

Future research should provide more insight on this topic.

 

Thank you for joining me for this episode of RESEARCHED. If you have questions, comments, or suggested readings related to today’s episode, or want to suggest a topic for future episodes, you can email me at Carla.bamesberger@colostate.edu, which you’ll find in the episode description. You’ll also find the citations for each article in the episode description.

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