Imagining Climate Change Promotes Pro-Environmental Motivation and Donation Behavior
Abstract
Abstract Can prompting people to generate vivid mental imagery while reading about climate change enhance pro-environmental intentions and donation behavior? Climate communication often relies on information provision or choice-architecture interventions (“nudges”), but these approaches frequently have limited behavioral impact. Because direct personal experience increases the salience and immediacy of climate threats, we tested whether mental imagery, internally generated simulations of sensory experience, could increase psychological proximity to climate change. Across two preregistered experiments ( N = 300 and N = 1,200), participants instructed to generate mental imagery while reading official EU climate information reported stronger pro-environmental intentions and donated more to an environmental charity than those who read the same material without imagery generation instructions. Study 1 found that imagery generation instructions led to more vivid and concrete mental representations of climate threat. Study 2 replicated the donation effect in a large sample across five EU countries. These findings suggest that a brief, low-cost imagery prompt can reliably increase pro-environmental intentions and real donation behavior.
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