[MCN] Is hope good for motivating collective action in the context of climate change?

Lance Olsen lance at wildrockies.org
Fri Aug 16 18:26:27 EDT 2019


Global Environmental Change <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/09593780>
Volume 58 <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/09593780/58/supp/C>, September 2019, 101915

Is hope good for motivating collective action in the context of climate change? Differentiating hope’s emotion- and problem-focused coping functions

Martijnvan ZomerenaInga L.PaulsbSmadarCohen-Chenc <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959378018313608#!>

Highlights

•The experience of hope may increase collective motivation for collective action.
•In the context of climate change, a coping perspective may explain when hope stimulates collective motivation and action.
•We find across three studies that experimentally manipulated a core antecedent of hope that this manipulation <https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/manipulator> only increased individuals’ hope.
•Hoping seems to serve an emotion-focused coping function in this context, which makes people feel better but does not solve the problem.

Abstract

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959378018313608 <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959378018313608>

Climate change may be the most fundamental collective action problem of all time. To solve it through collective action, collective motivation is required. Yet, given the complexity and scale of the collective problem, it may be difficult for individuals to experience such motivation. Intriguingly, the experience of hope may increase collective motivation and action. We offer an integrative coping perspective on hope and collective action in the context of climate change. It explains how hope stimulates individuals’ collective motivation to act against climate change (serving a problem-focused coping function), or fails to do so (serving an emotion-focused coping function). Testing these competing hypotheses, we conducted three studies that experimentally manipulated a core antecedent of hope (i.e., the perceived possibility of change) among US participants (total N = 1020). Across the board, this manipulation increased individuals’ hope but not their collective motivation and action. Furthermore, collective motivation predicted collective action intentions across all three studies. Hoping thus seems to serve an emotion-focused coping function and hence may not increase the collective motivation required for collective action in the context of climate change.


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“ Increasingly, fires are even spreading through the Arctic, where there is little to burn other than grasses, sedges, and a few shrubs.”

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/145417/a-new-global-fire-atlas?src=eoa-iotd

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