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Comparing threat- and solution-oriented climate communication: The role of hope, self-efficacy, and climate anxiety in motivating high-impact climate-friendly behavior

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Effective climate communication is essential for promoting meaningful behavioral change, particularly in high-impact domains such as mobility, diet, and energy use. While previous studies largely focused on low-impact behaviors, this study examined how messages describing climate threats or solutions influence intentions to engage in high-impact climate-friendly behaviors, and whether hope, self-efficacy, and climate anxiety help explain these intentions. In a pre-registered online experiment ( N = 1,509), Austrian participants were randomly shown messages describing climate threats, solutions, or unrelated control messages. The results show that message framing has no direct effects on behavioral intention and did not significantly affect self-efficacy in the main group comparison. However, solution messages elicited significantly more hope than threat messages, while the latter induced higher climate anxiety than solution or control messages. Self-efficacy and climate anxiety emerged as significant positive predictors of behavioral intention, with self-efficacy being the strongest. Hope, meanwhile, did not explain behavioral intention once other variables were considered. Exploratory path analyses revealed small indirect associations between threat-oriented messages and behavioral intentions via self-efficacy and climate anxiety, whereas no corresponding indirect associations emerged for solution-oriented messages. These findings indicate that psychological factors, particularly self-efficacy and climate anxiety, may be more relevant for high-impact climate actions than message framing per se.

Source: Journal of Environmental Psychology

DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvp.2026.103194

Authors: Stefan Ringhofer, Annina Thaller, Laura S. Loy, Marie Lisa Kogler

Institutions: University of Graz, Rheinland-Pfälzische Technische Universität Kaiserslautern-Landau

Language: English

Topic: Climate Change Communication and Perception

Subfield: Sociology and Political Science

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Climate action

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $4,380