Abstract
SummaryFor many, declining biodiversity represents an emotionally and psychologically distant ‘cost’ – similar to how a number of people perceive climate change. Using an expectancy-value theory framework, we showed participants photographs that visibly illustrated the threat of biodiversity loss. Specifically, we tested a combination of preregistered and exploratory hypotheses through an online experiment (n = 843) to understand whether viewing photographs of plants and animals (with and without captions) bolstered people’s valuing of biodiversity and willingness to donate to a nature-focused charity relative to a control group. Participants who viewed photographs (without captions) valued biodiversity more and donated more to the nature-focused charity; those who viewed photographs with captions showed similar though more muted (non-statistically significant) effects. Follow-up mediation analyses on the photographs-only participants suggested that the photographs may have catalysed negative emotions that increased valuing of biodiversity and, in turn, increased donations. This study provides preregistered evidence that thoughtfully selected photographs boost people’s valuing of biodiversity and exploratory evidence that the pathway through which that might occur is more likely via negative emotions than through reduced psychological distance. Educators, conservationists, journalists and others may find these results informative as they develop strategies for addressing the acute problem of biodiversity loss.
Highlights
The United Nations’ expert group on biodiversity and ecosystems recently released a bleak forecast of the state of the world’s flora and fauna (Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services 2019)
We predicted that the photographsplus-captions treatment group would value biodiversity to a greater extent than the control group
We found that participants in the photographs-only condition donated more of their allotted US$0.50 to the environmental charity than their control counterparts (B = US$0.036, SE = 0.015, 95% confidence intervals (CIs) = 0.006, 0.065, Cohen’s d = 0.20; see Fig. 1)
Summary
The United Nations’ expert group on biodiversity and ecosystems recently released a bleak forecast of the state of the world’s flora and fauna (Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services 2019). Declining biodiversity exacts high costs on all of humanity, including impacts on energy (e.g., wood fuel), medicines, food and even the air people breathe. As the cause of much of the loss of biodiversity, humans can still mitigate some of this decline and many of its repercussions. Increasing people’s valuing of biodiversity and understanding of the costs of biodiversity loss, as well as their desire to take action represent urgent problems
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