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An inconvenient truth? Can a film really affect psychological mood and our explicit attitudes towards climate change?

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Published/Copyright: September 29, 2011
Semiotica
From the journal Volume 2011 Issue 187

Abstract

Previous research has claimed that providing people with information about global warming may have a negative (and unanticipated) effect on their explicit attitudes towards climate change. One study found that more informed respondents felt less personally responsible for global warming and also showed less concern for the problem as a whole. This earlier study was, however, correlational in design and did not allow for firm conclusions regarding the direction of causality. For this reason, in our study we used an experimental approach — highly informative (and emotional) clips from An Inconvenient Truth were played to sets of participants and their mood states were measured as well as their explicit social attitudes/social cognitions on five critical scales (message acceptance/motivation to do something about climate change/empowerment/shifting responsibility for climate change/fatalism). Our study found that the clips did affect emotion, and in particular, they decreased the happiness and calmness levels of our participants, but they also felt more motivated to do something about climate change, more able to do something about climate change and, in addition, they were significantly less likely to think that they had no control over the whole climate change process. These were much more optimistic conclusions than the previous study had allowed, and they remind us of the power of strong informative and emotional messages on explicit attitude change and social cognition generally.

Keywords:: climate change; An Inconvenient Truth; emotion and global warming; explicit attitude to climate change
Published Online: 2011-09-29
Published in Print: 2011-October

© 2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston

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https://doi.org/10.1515/semi.2011.066
Keywords for this article
climate change; An Inconvenient Truth; emotion and global warming; explicit attitude to climate change

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Blending in mathematics
  2. Film as specific signifying practice: A rational reconstruction of Stephen Heath's “On screen, in frame: Film and ideology”
  3. Quarantine
  4. An inconvenient truth? Can a film really affect psychological mood and our explicit attitudes towards climate change?
  5. Crime and punishment: An analysis of university plagiarism policies
  6. The materiality of discourses and the semiotics of materials: A social perspective on the meaning potentials of written texts and furniture
  7. Reading movies as interactive messages: A proposal for a new method of analysis
  8. Fame and politics: The persuasive poetics of leadership
  9. Cosmos and creativity: Man in an evolving universe as a creative, aesthetical agent — some Peircean remarks
  10. Nonwestern semiotics and its possible impact on the composition of semiotics theory in the future
  11. IT terminology, translation, and semiotic levels: Cultural, lexicographic, and linguistic problems
  12. Formation of interpretants in Roentgen semiotics
  13. Automation of the linguistic translation processes: A study on viability
  14. An excess of signification: Or, what is an event?
  15. The illustration of beauty: Super-exposed in the U.S., veiled in Iran
  16. A novel semio-mathematical technique for excavating themes out of group dynamics
  17. Compound constructions: Waterproof three-storey brick and tile fire stations?
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