Exploring the Moral Challenges of Confronting High-Carbon-Emitting Behavior: The Role of Emotions and Media Coverage

• Main Authors: Franikowski, P. (Author), Nicolai, S. (Author), Stoll-Kleemann, S. (Author)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI 2022
• Subjects: (moral) emotions; COVID-19; exploration; Germany; health insurance; Highcarbon behavior; Media representation; Moral disengagement; Moral motivation; Pro-environmental behaviour; psychology; spatiotemporal analysis
• Online Access: View Fulltext in Publisher

 In this article, we address the climate crisis as a moral issue and discuss the relevant moral and emotional processes and the role of the media underlying the motivations of individuals to behave in a less carbon-emitting manner. We provide theoretical insights from social psychology and emotion research and empirical data based on an online survey from Germany (N = 979). In the theoretical part, we outline the role of emotions in influencing carbon-related behavior, with a particular focus on self-condemning (e.g., guilt or shame), self-praising (e.g., pride), or other-suffering emotions (e.g., empathy). We further summarize the reasons for the low influence of the media on carbon-related behavior compared to the COVID-19 pandemic. The empirical results confirm that participants reported other- suffering and self-condemning emotions in response to news content and rated their likelihood of personal behavior change as high when confronted with news about the climate crisis on a daily basis, as has been widely the case during the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that the media is responsible for regularly reporting on the victims of the climate crisis in order to generalize self-condemning and other-suffering emotions into affective attitudes. Opinion leaders can function as role models for low-carbon behavior. © 2022, MDPI. All rights reserved.