We are all aware of 2006’s “An Inconvenient Truth” – a documentary that brought the concept of global warming (or climate change) to the main stage. Reading through this lesson caused me to think more about global warming and global warming information that gets released. Intuitively, I would take a guess that most people took the issue more seriously after watching that documentary. It stated a lot of facts from scientific research which is very compelling and even skeptics could not ignore it. Former VP Al Gore became the catalyst to launch the issue of global warming into people’s minds as well as politics.
I did a little bit of research into this to see how effectively “An Inconvenient Truth” slipped into America’s psyche. I found a research paper called “An inconvenient truth? Can a film affect psychological mood and our explicit attitudes towards climate change?” By Geoffrey Beattie, Laura Sale, and Laura Mcguire that sought to find an answer to my question.
To do this study, first they played “highly informative (and emotional)” clips from the film to sets of participants and their “social attitudes/social cognitions” were measured on five scales. The scales were: “(message acceptance/motivation to do something about climate change/empowerment/shifting responsibility for climate change/fatalism)” (Beattie, 2011). Their study found that the clips definitely effected emotion and left participants feeling “motivated to do something about climate change” (Beatie, 2011).
I think the key factor is that people need to have a raw emotion about climate change. Someone can be explained the empirical facts of the matter, but one is likely to acknowledge the danger but at the same time not feel highly motivated. I think this is true of anything – motivation is very strong when there is an emotional target on the line.
The researchers actually observed this result as well, stating that emotions are “critical in this context” because feelings “often arise prior to cognition and play a crucial role in subsequent rational thought” (Beattie, 2011). It’s hard to have an emotional response about global warming because the damage takes place very slowly over a long period of time, so we don’t have that one instant spark of emotion since the problem is so big and we have plenty of time to find a solution. This is the challenge that the film was trying to solve, and for the most part it did a great job.
Resources
Beattie, Geoffrey & Sale, Laura & Mcguire, Laura. (2011). An inconvenient truth? Can a film really affect psychological mood and our explicit attitudes towards climate change?. Semiotica. 2011. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/270480063_An_inconvenient_truth_Can_a_film_really_affect_psychological_mood_and_our_explicit_attitudes_towards_climate_change