Conservation donations and pessimistic messaging
If you want to encourage people to adopt behaviours that will support conservation, do you think your communications should take a more optimistic or more pessimistic tone?
If you dig into the research, you'll find work that suggests optimism is best and some that suggests pessimism is best. Yup - nothing is straightforward!
Let's take a quick look at one piece of research that supports the use of pessimism. Last year, Cornell University's Josephine Martell and Amanda Rodewald published a study looking at the impact of messaging in the USA-based "3 Billion Birds" campaign, which aimed to encourage people to adopt behaviours that would help conserve birds.
The campaign included both pessimistic messages (e.g. 'oh no, we've lost around 3 billion birds since the 70s') and optimistic messages (e.g. 'this bird species is showing signs of recovery - hurrah!').
By surveying just shy of 2000 people, the researchers found that pessimistic messages:
Increased people's intention to donate
Increased people's intention to engage in political action around bird conservation
They also found that people's willingness to adopt conservation behaviours increased with both strong positive and strong negative emotions. In other words, regardless of whether the message had an optimistic or pessimistic slant, if people got emotional, they were more likely to adopt certain behaviours (well...say they would at least...)
Want to read the study for yourself? Unfortunately, it is behind a paywall, but if you have access or want to pay for it (or want to contact the researcher directly for a copy using their email in the link), head here
