How dual-message nature documentaries that portray nature as amazing and threatened affect entertainment experiences and pro-environmental intentions

Abstract

Nature documentaries are an entertaining and informative genre that appears well-suited to environmental communication. However, producers of nature documentaries face a dilemma: Although they aim to inspire their audiences to act pro-environmentally, they fear ruining viewers’ entertainment experience if they address environmental destruction. Hence, conventional nature documentaries solely portray pristine nature. In contrast, recent nature documentaries have adopted a dual-message strategy by showing beautiful nature footage while also addressing conservation issues. We investigated how these dual-message nature documentaries affect viewers’ hedonic and eudaimonic entertainment experiences and their pro-environmental behavior intentions compared with conventional nature documentaries. We integrated theoretical accounts from entertainment research and environmental psychology and tested our assumptions in three online experiments (total N = 1,362). Our findings suggest that dual-message nature documentaries evoke weaker hedonic experiences than conventional documentaries but stronger eudaimonic experiences (i.e., mixed affect and reflection) that mediate the effect of dual-message documentaries on pro-environmental intentions.