Publication of the Month- October 2023

Welcome to our Publication of the Month news release series, where we highlight some of the work that is taking place within the School of Psychology. This month, we are featuring a journal from Dr Charles Ogunbode, titled: ‘Effects of information exposure on risk perception and worry about ocean acidification: evidence from Norway and the UK’. Charles has put together a few words summarising his research:

“If there ever was an award for the biggest global challenge hardly anyone has heard of, ocean acidification would be the chief contender. From the start of the industrial revolution, the chemistry of the world’s oceans has been changing due to increasing absorption of carbon dioxide emitted by human activities. The rising acidity of the ocean threatens the survival of many marine species. It also has severe implications for millions of people around the world whose livelihoods depend on marine fisheries and aquaculture. Ocean acidification is often described as the “evil twin” of climate change – another global problem caused by human activities that is mainly driven by carbon dioxide emissions.

Considering the overlap between actions needed to address ocean acidification and climate change, and the generally low public awareness of the former, engaging the public with the risks associated with ocean acidification provides a potential opportunity to side-step the often politically polarised climate change debate and drive forward action on emissions reduction. Consequently, in this study we were interested in identifying how best to present people with information about ocean acidification.

Previous studies had h that presenting people with scientific facts about ocean acidification increases their concern about the issue, but these studies did not use rigorous experimental methods to demonstrate the causal effect of information provision on levels of concern. Furthermore, it has been increasingly shown that the detached, plain, style of communication in which scientific information is traditionally presented to the public often fails to engage audiences. People respond more strongly to information that is presented in the graphic, emotive, and chronological style that is more commonly associated with storytelling.

We conducted an experiment with a group of participants in Norway, and another group in the UK, where we assigned participants to one of three groups. The first group received a brief factual description of the causes and effects of ocean acidification presented in a traditional ‘plain’ scientific style. The second group received a vivid description of the causes and effects of ocean acidification that was matched in factual content with what the first group received. The information given to the second group was in fact a paragraph from an internationally acclaimed essay by David Wallace-Wells titled ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’. The third group of participants, our control, were instructed to imagine a landscape and write down all the features of the scene they had mentally visualised.

When we compared these three groups of participants, we found that the more story-like graphic description of ocean acidification generally increased people’s risk perception, concern, and abilities to mentally visualise the cause and effects of ocean acidification, relative to the plain factual information and control conditions. The effects of providing plain factual information were inconsistent. In our Norwegian study, plain information did not perform any better than the control group (who received no information) in its effects on risk perception and worry about ocean acidification. In the UK study, providing plain information resulted in higher levels of worry and perceived severity of ocean acidification risks compared with the control group, but there was no significant difference in people’s perception of the likelihood that ocean acidification would pose a serious threat during their lifetime.

The main upshot of our findings is that the way we present information about pressing global challenges matter for audience engagement. Here we demonstrate that presenting information about ocean acidification to people in a vivid and story-like narrative style consistently triggers affective and cognitive responses that are known to be precursors of action and policy support.”

If this article has caught your interest, you can read it at the following place: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/25670463/effects-of-information-exposure-on-risk-perception-and-worry-about-ocean-acidification-evidence-from-norway-and-the-uk