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Feeling of guilt explains why people react differently to resource depletion warnings
Despite insistent warnings from climate scientists, the global environmental situation is further deteriorating. To date, only very few studies have investigated the impact of warnings on sustainable decision-making in controlled laboratory settings. Moreover, the few existing studies mainly looked...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group UK
2021
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8185082/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34099812 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-91472-0 |
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author | Baumgartner, Thomas Lobmaier, Janek S. Ruffieux, Nicole Knoch, Daria |
author_facet | Baumgartner, Thomas Lobmaier, Janek S. Ruffieux, Nicole Knoch, Daria |
author_sort | Baumgartner, Thomas |
collection | PubMed |
description | Despite insistent warnings from climate scientists, the global environmental situation is further deteriorating. To date, only very few studies have investigated the impact of warnings on sustainable decision-making in controlled laboratory settings. Moreover, the few existing studies mainly looked at average warning reactions rather than taking individual differences into account. Here, we investigated individual differences in the reaction to resource depletion warnings and scrutinized the impact of emotions on behavioural changes by applying a resource dilemma task with warnings. Data-driven and model-free cluster analyses identified four different types of consumption behaviour. Importantly, guilt was positively related to sustainable decision-making after warnings. In contrast, a lack of guilt was associated with no behavioural change or even worse with more unsustainable behaviour after warnings. These findings contribute to the debate over effective climate change communication by demonstrating that issuing warnings about the climate crisis only leads to the intended behavioural changes if people experience guilt. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8185082 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group UK |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-81850822021-06-09 Feeling of guilt explains why people react differently to resource depletion warnings Baumgartner, Thomas Lobmaier, Janek S. Ruffieux, Nicole Knoch, Daria Sci Rep Article Despite insistent warnings from climate scientists, the global environmental situation is further deteriorating. To date, only very few studies have investigated the impact of warnings on sustainable decision-making in controlled laboratory settings. Moreover, the few existing studies mainly looked at average warning reactions rather than taking individual differences into account. Here, we investigated individual differences in the reaction to resource depletion warnings and scrutinized the impact of emotions on behavioural changes by applying a resource dilemma task with warnings. Data-driven and model-free cluster analyses identified four different types of consumption behaviour. Importantly, guilt was positively related to sustainable decision-making after warnings. In contrast, a lack of guilt was associated with no behavioural change or even worse with more unsustainable behaviour after warnings. These findings contribute to the debate over effective climate change communication by demonstrating that issuing warnings about the climate crisis only leads to the intended behavioural changes if people experience guilt. Nature Publishing Group UK 2021-06-07 /pmc/articles/PMC8185082/ /pubmed/34099812 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-91472-0 Text en © The Author(s) 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . |
spellingShingle | Article Baumgartner, Thomas Lobmaier, Janek S. Ruffieux, Nicole Knoch, Daria Feeling of guilt explains why people react differently to resource depletion warnings |
title | Feeling of guilt explains why people react differently to resource depletion warnings |
title_full | Feeling of guilt explains why people react differently to resource depletion warnings |
title_fullStr | Feeling of guilt explains why people react differently to resource depletion warnings |
title_full_unstemmed | Feeling of guilt explains why people react differently to resource depletion warnings |
title_short | Feeling of guilt explains why people react differently to resource depletion warnings |
title_sort | feeling of guilt explains why people react differently to resource depletion warnings |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8185082/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34099812 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-91472-0 |
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