Since you liked crisis you might like extremism

Unpacking "climate anxiety"

In one of my first posts on Substack I argued that researchers studying “climate anxiety,”¹ and the broader “eco-anxiety” were studying the effects of contemporary political campaigns on young people rather than the actual impacts of anthropogenic climate change on mental health. I’ve since written a bit more (here and here).

I’ve wavered between seeing the conversation around climate anxiety as a side show to climate’s overall three ring circus and seeing it as a strategic campaign. At this point, I’m leaning towards the latter.

I expect to have a series of posts unpacking this topic; it is a bit of rabbit hole.

Adolescents are a focus for advocacy because their stage of brain and social development makes them highly influenceable- as anyone who was once a teenager or raised a teenager is likely well aware. Specifically, writes climate anxiety researchers,

[a]dolescence is a pivotal developmental stage that makes this age group particularly relevant for climate change interventions.

There is a range of studies dedicated to understanding the relationship between online content, adolescents’ emotional response, and their inclination towards activism. The research is not infrequently performed under the guise of public health with the argument that collective activism is a mechanism for managing anxiety and thus, researchers are claiming to be addressing concerns about mental health decline caused by a climate crisis.

Many, if not most, studies focus their efforts on understanding the impacts of advocacy messaging on the subset of people that already hold more extreme views on climate change. This population is a niche group.

A group of researchers studying people in the UK find that the “Strongest predictor of climate anxiety is climate information seeking behaviour” and further, climate anxiety predicts activism. Hence, if you are in the business of provoking climate activism through online content it makes sense to target people that are online already looking for certain types of information about climate change.

In this post² I pull together a few studies that illustrates the way researchers position “climate anxiety” as a reason to disseminate bespoke political marketing ads for advocacy and as public health intervention.

Predicting the Performance of Facebook Advertisements About Climate Change Using Self-report Data (Environmental Communication)

Researchers at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication studied factors that predict a Facebook user’s sharing of a climate change related advertisement (here in preprint).

The study focused on Facebook users already inclined to engage with climate change information and so the researchers specifically focused on the Alarmed as this is the audience segment “most worried about and engaged with” the topic of climate change.

Elsewhere, the Alarmed are characterized as convinced climate change is an urgent threat, more educated than the national average, and “tend to be younger, female, and people of color.”

The researchers find that strong emotional response- positive or negative- is a predictor of sharing the Facebook advertisement

a U-shaped relationship between people’s emotional reactions to the posts and the number of shares, such that emotionally-neutral posts were shared less often than posts that elicited either a strongly positive or negative emotional response.

The Yale researchers conclude that further research should focus on fine tuning advertisement characteristics to understand what leads people to click or share social media content on climate change.

Figure 2 out of Goldberg et al. The x axis runs from strongly negative (on left) to strongly positive (on right

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Climate change hopefulness, anxiety, and behavioral intentions among adolescents: randomized controlled trail of brief ‘selfie’ video interventions (Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health)

Public health researchers examined how different TikTok videos attenuate feelings of climate anxiety among minors 14-18 years old.

The researchers find that

Viewing positive “selfie” videos proved effective among adolescents in increasing hopefulness and a sense of agency regarding climate change (< 0.001), but not in decreasing climate anxiety or increasing intentions to engage in pro-environmental behaviors.

The authors conclude that a single exposure to the videos, negative or positive, may not be enough to influence the impact of the messages and thus, future research should examine repeated “doses” of exposure.

The researchers also suggest their results show that negative messaging about climate change is preferred over no messaging:

The control condition's notably worse performance on hopefulness measures may reflect the cognitive dissonance created by watching content entirely disconnected from climate change, potentially triggering a sense of absurdity about addressing trivial matters while avoiding crucial environmental concerns. This unexpected finding suggests that even pessimistic engagement with climate change may be preferable to complete disconnection from the issue.

To fully appreciate what is meant by negative messaging in this area of study, I encourage you to sacrifice a few minutes to view and consider the TikTok videos researchers developed for this study. The links are found in the article’s supplementary data document which is this link to a google drive.

The videos are perhaps an indication of where all this is going among academic researchers.

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Worry's Clout: Concern, not positive affectivity, drives climate activism (Journal of Environmental Psychology)

Using worry as a proxy for anxiety, two German researchers worked to develop and validate a “Climate Activism Scale.” Their study used participants, 16-29 years old with educational levels that are indicative of activist groups.

The authors find that

Climate worry predicts increased activism but activism also increases worry. The effects peak after one year. Climate positive affectivity does not predict activism; instead, engagement against climate change marginally decreases climate-related positive affectivity… However, exploratory analyses reveal that emotional ambivalence—the combination of climate-related worry and positive affectivity—is more effective than worry alone in predicting climate activism.

Hence, the finely attuned messaging that gives just enough positive feelings to harness the anxiety for activism over the long term.

The researchers conclude:

Given the modest level of climate-related worry in the population, public discourse should raise rather than alleviate public concern about the negative consequences of climate change. Concurrently, measures should be in place to bolster the emotional resilience of activists, enabling them to remain active without succumbing to emotional exhaustion.

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In my view, what is happening in the above is that academic researchers under the guise of science communication and public health are fine tuning online methods to target a niche group of people- mostly minors and young adults- who show unique vulnerability to deeply negative emotional responses to a policy issue in order to mobilize them towards political activism.

And that’s all before we critique the representation of scientific knowledge about climate change being conveyed in these online messages.

While this may be legitimate (albeit still unsetting) research for a political marketing firm, claims to be doing this as a means of improving public health are problematic for epistemic and practical reasons.

I’ll take this up in a later post.

1. The phrase deserves scare quotes for reasons discussed here and in later posts.

2. For my purposes here I am not addressing the field’s overtly normative orientation around crisis and misrepresentation of scientific knowledge about climate change. I’ll address that more in a later post and have discussed it a bit in previous posts.