We conducted a large-scale online experiment to examine whether climate change messaging can induce emotions and motivate pro-environmental action. We study how exposure to explicit positive (‘warm glow’) and negative (‘cold prickle’) emotional appeals as well as a traditional social norm communication affects pro-environmental action. We find that a simple call to take action to mitigate climate change is at least as affective as social norm message framing and emotional appeals. Our results highlight the difficulty of designing messaging interventions that effectively harness emotional incentives to promote pro-environmental action. Messages that explicitly emphasise the personal emotional benefits of contributing to environmental causes or the adverse emotional effects of not doing so seem to fall short of motivating pro-environmental effort. Our findings underscore the need for caution when incorporating emotive appeals into policy interventions.

We examine the effect of an irrelevant task that may become a reference point on subjects’ effort, feelings and perceptions. All subjects complete up to 25 tasks and are paid $0.10 per task solved correctly. However, some subjects have an easy task of finding one letter and others have a hard task of finding two letters. In the irrelevant-task treatment conditions subjects are told about the two types of tasks and are then assigned randomly to one. In addition, there are two control conditions, and in each control condition subjects are assigned to a specific task without the other task being possible or mentioned. Subjects in the irrelevant-task treatments express more positive (negative) feelings when assigned to the easy (hard) task. The control conditions that have no reference point of another task are in between the two irrelevant-task treatments in the feeling ratings. We hypothesized that for a given task, the subjects in the experimental conditions that have more positive feelings will also solve more tasks, but this hypothesis was not supported by the data. Finally, subjects who receive the easy task complete more tasks than the ones with the hard task.