Tackling climate change will require huge changes in society . Decarbonizing energy, restoring habitat and making food supply sustainable are all critical, but methods for motivating these actions have typically taken the wrong approach—by highlighting the urgency of the issues and the disastrous consequences of failing to act. Research increasingly suggests that trying to promote behavioral change through fear can be counterproductive , leading to anxiety or depression that results in an issue being avoided, denied or met with a sense of helplessness. However, in education , news and fiction , stories with positive role models and which focus on the positive outcomes of solutions are much more likely to inspire action to solve it. The Power of Positive Stories I set out to explore the impact of such stories. As part of my research , 91 volunteers were given two stories to read, each concerned with the negative impacts of climate change: one about a woman caught in a flood and the other set at the end of the world. The same readers were also exposed to two positive stories: one about a terrorist planting a flower bomb, which populates a bare area with flowers, the other about […]
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