Abstract:

Decades of widespread knowledge about climate change has failed to translate into assertive actions. Simply improving people’s understanding, awareness and concern about environmental problems has been insufficient to motivate deep engagement and agency. People are kin to value sustainable ideas, but their behaviour is incompatible with respect to their beliefs. In the social psychology literature, holding an inconsistency is theorized to elicit feelings of anxiety and discomfort, termed dissonance, and the individual experiencing the dissonance is theoretically motivated to reduce them. The point is that, to go on with every-day life, people seem to prefer to rationalise their self-exempting beliefs (thus trivializing harmful climate consequences) instead of taking an affirmative action. The recognition of this reality has led researchers to recommend storytellers to conceptualize climate change in terms of an action-based approach able to handle positively the phenomena of cognitive dissonance.

In this paper we analyse nine commercial campaigns that clearly try to persuade viewers to take meaningful actions towards environmental sustainability and climate change. The aim is to provide insights into the cognitive strategies that communicators use in their creative process of telling dissonant stories; and, consequently, to enlarge the repertoire of meaningful pedagogical tools for motivating ‘true climate actions’. Creative professionals and content creators are regarded as communities of practice which have a recognizable role in helping society to shift from an issue-based conceptualization of climate change to an action-based one. Also, evidence exists in the literature showing that successful commercials act as external forces that may be responsible to induce people to reconcile inconsistencies within their minds. These commercials rarely encourage actions just by saying, but by showing its point through a visual story. They belong to that special kind of story that have the quality to exert attractiveness and to push viewers towards a cinematic interpretation. In this kind of story, attempts to reduce dissonance evoke vivid and lively images that help creators to dramatize the words that tell the stories.

Methodologically, focusing on the conflicts that the commercials raise, we look at the narrative structure of the stories and search for the cognitive strategies that creators bring into play to deliver their messages. The result is the identification of two main strategies: the use of disnarrated events (events that do not happen but are nonetheless referred to, in a negative or hypothetical mode); and alternativity (a special view point device involved in counterfactuality and negation). We close the paper by showing how these strategies can enlarge the repertory of pedagogical tools for improving climate action-based storytelling, particularly when integrated with the literary narrative strategy of storyness inversion, known to produce a deep sense of engagement.

Keywords:

Climate change communication, action-based storytelling, cognitive dissonance, strategies of dissonance reduction, storytelling pedagogical tools.