A surging number of climate change communication studies have investigated the psychological distance of climate change, the role of discrete emotions, and the impact of climate change visuals. Bridging these areas of study, we made an initial attempt to explore the mediating role of emotional valence and the moderating role of visual literacy in the relationship between (abstract, concrete) construal level and climate change engagement. We found evidence that concrete (vs. abstract) images brought people negative (vs. positive) feelings, which subsequently led people to perceive less psychological distance to climate change, generate greater concern and willingness to act. In addition, people with low (vs. high) visual literacy were more influenced by the construal level visual manipulation. And unlike highly visually literate people who were motivated by abstract images to engage with climate change, people with low level of visual literacy were positively influenced by concrete images. Overall, we demonstrate how abstract and concrete visual messaging strategies may be used more effectively with the consideration of emotional valence and individual’s visual literacy. The theoretical integration and empirical tests respond to the recent calls for more nuanced understanding of emotional complexity, individual differences in preferences for local versus global climate change images (Wang et al. 2019; Chapman et al. 2017). The results also offer practical implications to communicators, advocates, and media workers regarding how to promote climate change engagement among different groups of audience with the effective use of visuals.
The analyses show that participants who viewed abstract images perceived greater distance between climate change and themselves. This is aligned with environmental communication literature which explained that local frames of climate change could encourage people’s worry and concern about the issue (Bloodhart et al. 2015). It also confirms CLT which suggests that people’s perceived psychological distance to an issue is positively influenced by the level of abstraction at which the issue is mentally represented (Trope and Liberman 2010). Future visual communication scholars and advocates could follow this line of thinking to explore how to use concretizing strategies to make climate change become psychologically close to the public.
Supporting the hypotheses, we found that abstract images led to increased perceived psychological distance, less concern and willingness to act via positive emotions. This finding is in close accord with past CLT literature which explains that compared to concrete construals, abstract construals encourage people to generate more pros (reasons in favor of a course of action) than cons (reasons against a course of action), consequently having more positive perceptions of an issue (Eyal et al. 2004; Williams et al. 2014). Also, the negativity elicited by concrete thinking of climate change could further encourage climate change engagement. It is likely that when portraying climate change negatively, a low level, concrete construal could help motivate people with urgency and action-oriented thinking. Whereas under a high level, abstract construal, the negativity might become vague, involve less intense emotions, and thus raise less concern or behavioral intentions (Van Lent et al. 2017). Although fear was sometimes overwhelming and discouraging (O'Neill and Nicholson-Cole 2009), future scholars could build on our finding and continue to explore whether or not concretizing certain negative emotions (e.g., using anger instead of sadness) might be able to effectively promote climate change engagement.
Despite concrete thinking encouraging concern and willingness to act via negative emotions, we found that construal level mindsets did not directly influence people’s concern for climate change, nor did they have a direct impact on willingness to act. These findings are aligned with CLT which originally explains only the positive relationship between construal level of and psychological distance of an issue, not how such construal level cognitive style is related to environmentally friendly attitudinal and behavioral outcomes (Trope and Liberman 2010). The findings are also consistent with the CLT assumption in climate change context explained by McDonald et al. (2015) and Brügger et al. (2016), confirming that abstract and concrete construals of climate change both have merits in encouraging pro-environmental behavioral intentions. In light of this, future studies should be more cautious when using construal level messaging strategies to influence the public. Instead, more investigations are needed to unveil under what emotional valence or other informational and personal conditions may construal level be effective in mobilizing climate friendly attitudes and behaviors.
Furthermore, findings from our analysis show that individuals’ visual literacy played an important moderating role between construal level and climate change outcomes, though it did not influence the indirect effect of emotional valence on the relationship. This is consistent with previous work by McDonald et al. (2015), which claimed that the effect of abstract versus concrete messages on people’s climate change decision-making is dependent upon various individual-level factors. Specifically, we found that less visually literate people were more influenced by the construal level visual manipulation, and concrete images made them perceive significantly less psychological distance to climate change. On the contrary, the perceived psychological distance among people with higher visual literacy was not influenced by the construal level visual effect. One possible explanation is that highly visually literate people were able to critically consume visual information. As a result, they were less subject to visual abstraction or concreteness persuasion tactics. This confirms the study by Messaris (1994), Messaris and Moriarty (2005), unveiling that audience critical visual thinking and design skills can greatly impact the effectiveness of visual communication.
Additionally, we found that abstract images drove highly visually literate people to engage with climate change. Whereas less visually literate people were more motivated to engage by concrete images. We speculate that in abstract images, there is a lack of detailed information, and meanings are symbolic, indirect, and are constructed via black-white, data-intensive graphs, cartoons. All of these features require higher visual thinking and design ability. This way, people with high visual literacy are able to understand the abstract images more deeply, process them more effectively, and thus being able to get motivated by them. For less visually literate audiences, concrete images communicate the direct, representational rather than symbolic meanings to them with detailed information, human elements, colorful design, and these facilitate better, easier visual message processing and thus more favorability among them. This result also explains one of our earlier findings that abstract and concrete construals did not directly influence people. We speculate that abstract and concrete visual portrayals of climate change activate not only different construal levels but also people’s visual skills. And for viewers with different visual literacy levels, the processing style and the level of understanding of the visual information might be different. Future research should continue to explore visual literacy as an influential personal factor and take other audience characteristics (e.g., cognitive style, visual preference) into account when examining visual communication effectiveness. These findings shed light on the importance of incorporating visual literacy into visual communication efforts.
Overall, our study is a first step toward an integration of construal level and emotions in climate change visual communication. We demonstrate that concrete visuals of climate change elicit negative emotions toward the issue, which further leads to greater concern, willingness to act. There are also individual differences in terms of visual information processing. For people with high visual literacy, visual construal level effect on perceived distance to the risk is minimal, and abstract images are more effective in encouraging climate change engagement. However, for less visually literate people, we found the opposite patterns.
This study is not without limitations. First, this study measured visual literacy by self-reported questions that focused on visual creation skills, visual use and thinking habits. The questions on how well people interpret visuals did not reach internal consistency and were thus eliminated from further analyses. Second, in this study, we did not differentiate between low-level (concrete) and high-level (abstract) behaviors, or near future (short-term) and distant future (long-term) behaviors, which were found in prior research to possibly associate with different concrete and abstract construals, respectively. Last, emotional valence in our study captured only the overall affective responses people had towards the images, and it is unknown how intense people felt towards the images and what exact discrete emotion contributed to the attitudinal or behavioral change. Future research should continue to investigate the interactions between construal level and emotions, with more variables being considered such as emotional intensity, the abstraction and concreteness of the emotion.
It is expected that this study will encourage future research on the intersections among construal level of climate change, emotions, and climate change visual communication. On the one hand, future research should build on our findings to link people’s construal level with psychological distance and other attitudinal or behavioral outcomes to further assess construal level visualizing strategies. On the other hand, the results from this study show construal level effect becomes salient and gets intensified by positive and negative emotions, and among less visually literate audience. Future studies should further explore under what other cognitive or affective conditions or in what audience groups abstract and concrete construals can be particularly effective in influencing people’s ecological attitudes.