With a little help from my friends: Social support, hope and climate change engagement

Abstract

Hope is a future-oriented emotion that attunes people to the possibility of positive change, and thus could potentially catalyse societal engagement with climate change. A recent meta-analysis suggests that the relationship between hope and climate action is most robust when the target of hope is climate engagement (i.e. action hope) rather than climate change more broadly. Yet, this previous meta-analysis also suggests that fostering action hope and climate engagement may be challenging via typical short media messages used in many studies. Here we consider an alternative source of action hope: receiving social support. Two studies tested whether social support motivates climate action via increased action hope. Study 1 (correlational online survey, pre-registered, N = 887) demonstrates that, as predicted, both instrumental and emotional support predict intentions to take civic action and these effects are explained by action hope. Study 2 (field study, N_educators = 84, N_contacts = 520) mostly replicates and extends these findings in a field setting, demonstrating that social support recipients' action hope is also associated with social support reported by support providers (here, environmental educators) and that this action hope again explains a possible relationship between social support and climate engagement.