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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...

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Autores principales: Baumgartner, Thomas, Lobmaier, Janek S., Ruffieux, Nicole, Knoch, Daria
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2021
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.
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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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