Untangling the components of hope: Increasing pathways (not agency) explains the success of an intervention that increases educators’ climate change discussions

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2019.101366Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Conducted a climate change communication training program for educators working at aquariums, zoos, and national parks.

  • Program designed to improve educators' hope about discussing climate change and thereby increase discussion of the topic.

  • Based on hope theory, we assessed agency and pathways as possible mediators of the intervention's success.

  • The intervention improved both agency and pathways thinking.

  • However, only changes in pathways thinking mediated increased discussion.

Abstract

Previous research suggests that many who are concerned about climate change self-silence on the topic; failing to engage in regular discussion about climate change despite their desires to do so. This research examines how a communication training program for environmental educators working at aquariums, zoos, and national parks might boost this population's willingness to discuss climate change with visitors via increasing hope. Using hope theory, we examined whether changes in the two components of hope – agency (the will; sense of successful determination) and pathways (the ways; the perception that one can generate a diversity of routes to one's goal, even when encountering barriers) – mediated increases in participants' self-reported discussion of climate change following the training program. Participants (environmental educators; N = 211) completed surveys before, immediately after (mediators only), and six months following (outcome only) a training program. Although having greater agency predicted frequency of climate change discussions (i.e., at the between-person level), (within-person) increases in agency did not lead to increases in discussion or mediate the effect of the intervention on discussion. Instead, increases in pathways thinking mediated the effect of the intervention on increased discussion. Our results indicate that, at least among those who already have the desire to discuss climate change more, interventions which instill hope toward such discussions, and specifically, focus on building a greater variety of methods of engaging in the discussions and responding to obstacles (i.e., pathways thinking), have the potential to promote more extensive public discourse on the topic.

Introduction

Despite a solid majority of Americans reporting some degree of concern about climate change, ascribing importance to the topic, and reporting that they would like to hear about the topic more often (Funk, Kennedy, Hefferon, & Strauss, 2018; Howe, Mildenberger, Marlon, & Leiserowitz, 2015; Leiserowitz, Maibach, Roser-Renouf, Feinberg, & Rosenthal, 2015), few report discussing the topic on a regular basis (Ballew et al., 2019). Previous research suggests that many of those who are concerned about climate change self-silence on the issue, electing not to engage in interpersonal discourse about the topic despite their perception that the topic is important (Geiger & Swim, 2016; Geiger, Swim, & Fraser, 2017; Norgaard, 2011). Even many environmental educators and conservationists – whose jobs involve the task of communication about such topics and whose job training and experience seemingly would prepare them to engage in climate change-related communication – often hold back when discussing climate change with the public and would like to discuss climate change more frequently than they actually do (Swim & Fraser, 2014). In fact, these individuals report severe psychological distress as a result of not being able to connect with others by discussing a topic about which they report concern (Fraser & Brandt, 2013; Fraser, Pantesco, Plemons, Gupta, & Rank, 2013).

One major barrier to discussion and other forms of climate change engagement, especially among those who are already concerned and desire to engage in more frequent discussion on the topic, might be a lack of hope (Geiger, Swim, Gasper, Fraser, & Flinner, 2020; Marlon et al., 2019; Norgaard, 2011). Research from education and health psychology reveals that hope can encourage active coping in response to difficult experiences (Snyder et al., 1996; Snyder, Lehman, Kluck, & Monsson, 2006). Yet, ethnographic and quantitative research indicates that many individuals – including trained environmental educators - lack hope about climate change discussions (Norgaard, 2011; Swim & Fraser, 2014). Thus, a socially relevant question examined in the present work is whether an intervention designed to increase a sense of hope about engaging in climate change discussion can promote more frequent engagement in interpersonal discourse about this topic among those who already wish to do so. Here, we examine this question by investigating how an intervention targeted toward environmental educators might help these educators to reach their goal of being able to more frequently discuss climate change.

Section snippets

Hope theory and goal-directed behavior

Hope is typically conceptualized as an affective, cognitive, and/or motivational state which reflects the manner in which individuals relate to desired and uncertain future outcomes (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). This definition partially reflects lay conceptualizations of hope that refer to optimism, wishes, wants, and desires (suggestive of an emotional-motivational focus; Malle, 2004). In contrast to lay definitions of hope, but also reflective of the broader construct, here we define hope

Present research

The purpose of this work is to examine the role of agency and pathways thinking about engaging in climate change discussion as mediators of hope-based interventions designed to foster interpersonal discourse about climate change. We examine whether increasing environmental educators’ agency and/or pathways thinking can account for the effects of an intervention on increasing climate change discussion among these educators that was previously documented in Geiger, Swim, Fraser, and Flinner (2017)

Pilot work

The pilot study verifies that agency and pathways thinking at the between-person level would show similar relationships to willingness to discuss climate change as they have done with other behavioral responses. Prior to engaging in a small group discussion about climate change (conducted for use in a separate study; see Geiger & Swim, 2016), 194 undergraduate college students completed a survey assessing their agency, pathways thinking, and willingness to discuss climate change. Because

Main study

The main study examines the role of increased agency and pathways thinking about climate change discussion following a skills-based training program (intervention) that aimed to increase the frequency of initiation of climate change discussions by educators at informal science learning centers (e.g., zoos, aquariums, national parks) in the United States. In this target population, the outcome of engaging in climate change discussions with visitors is particularly relevant because educators

Discussion

This research reveals that interventions can promote discussion about climate change through increasing hope. These findings support prior supposition (Chadwick, 2015; Mann, Hassol, & Toles, 2017; Smith & Leiserowitz, 2014) that increasing hope through an intervention can have positive effects on behavioral responses to climate change; specifically, fostering an increase in interpersonal discourse about the topic among environmental educators.

This work advances theoretical perspectives on when

Conclusion

This work demonstrates that hope-related interventions can promote discussion about climate change via the causal mechanism of increasing hope about engaging in discussion. In particular, our results suggest that interventions that teach a variety of methods toward engaging in interpersonal discourse and overcoming barriers to such discourse (i.e. pathways thinking) can catalyze individuals’ unfulfilled desires to communicate about this socially relevant issue with others, at least among a

Ethical standards

This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at Penn State University. This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors. All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments. All survey respondents provided implied consent.

Funding

This research was partially supported by National Science Foundation (United States) Grant DUE 1239775.

Declaration of competing interest

All authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the 117 members of the National Network for Ocean and Climate Change Interpretation (NNOCCI) for supporting data gathering for this study; William (Billy) Spitzer, John Anderson, Hannah Pickard, Janan Evans-Wilent and the rest of team at New England Aquarium; Shelley J. Rank, Kate Flinner, and Sean Beharry and the rest of the NewKnowledge team.

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      In the climate-change field quite many researchers conceptualize hope in accordance with Snyder's hope theory, where the cognitive aspects of hope are in focus, especially pathway thinking, i.e., the capability to come up with ways to reach a desired goal or prevent something bad from happening, and agency thinking, i.e., working to activate these pathways and striving actively to reach goals [6]. These studies are mostly correlational in character, and they usually show that hope is positively related to climate-change engagement and pro-environmental behaviors among both adults [7–9] as well as children and adolescents [ [10–14]). These studies use a range of measures of climate-change hope, sometimes combining agency and pathways [10], while other times focusing only on agency [9].

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      We cannot rule out reverse causation for the correlation between emotions and discussing climate change. Research on emotions suggests that emotions motivate actions (Ferguson and Branscombe, 2010; Van Doorn, Heerdink and Van Kleef, 2012; van Zomeren, 2013; Geiger et al., 2019). Yet research also suggests that discussions could accentuate emotions (Isenberg, 1986; van Zomeren et al., 2004).

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      In turn, these different target objects might influence whether individuals take on a problem-focused coping role (motivating action) or an emotion-focused coping role (demotivating action; van Zomeren et al., 2019). In contrast, hope elicited in response to the possibility of taking specific interpersonal actions (e.g., discussing climate change) appears to more consistently promote a problem-focused coping role and predicts engagement with those actions (Geiger, Gasper, Swim, & Fraser, 2019; Swim & Fraser, 2014). Furthermore, perceptions of self- and collective efficacy are related to hope about taking action (Carifio & Rhodes, 2002) and these efficacy perceptions also predict pro-environmental behavioral intentions (Doherty & Webler, 2016; Geiger et al., 2017; Jugert et al., 2016).

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