Can framing encourage conversation about climate change?

Can framing encourage conversation about climate change?

This talk will present initial findings into a novel framing experiment that aimed to test the effect of social agreement frames on one's willingness to communicate about climate change. Understanding how to encourage discussion will be important in everyday settings of climate change communication.

Framing is a way of selecting certain elements of an issue and emphasising those over others in order to create tailored understandings. Framing has typically been conceptualised as being best suited to message transmission, and hence, experiments have tended to test the effect of climate change messages on different dependent variables such as beliefs in climate change, attitudes towards mitigation, and emotions. Discussion on climate change is an important aspect of building social support for climate policy, but it is currently unknown whether framing climate change in terms of agreement or disagreement can affect one's willingness to talk.

Speaker Bio: Nic Badullovich is a final year PhD candidate in the Resources, Environment & Development (RE&D) group at the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University. His research focus is positioned around the social dimensions of climate change with a focus on communication. His thesis will be a compilation of different published articles, both quantitative and qualitative that investigate a common thread of 'framing' in communication.

Seminar Series: The Social Dimensions of Climate Change Transitions in Australia

This talk is the first in a new series about social aspects of climate change transitions.