• External Shocks

• Shared responsibility and sustainable cooperation

Doing Good Feels Better: Moral Appeals Shape Reward-related Neural Activity for Pro-environmental Gains

Although difficult, behavior change is crucial to address global challenges like climate change, given its deep ties with human activity. Previous research shows that people have a strong desire to be moral, making moral appeals (i.e., messages aiming to invoke the feeling of moral responsibility) promising tools to enhance motivation for behavior change (van Nunspeet & Ellemers, 2024). Although moral responsibility has been shown to strongly motivate positive behavior change, using moral appeals to activate this motivation do not always succeed (Luttrell, 2025; van Nunspeet & Ellemers, 2024). Studies show that moral appeals can also produce resistance or even backfire (Luttrell, 2025; van Nunspeet & Ellemers, 2024). Thus, understanding the factors that influence the effectiveness of moral appeals is essential for finding ways to increase feelings of moral responsibility for positive behavior change without eliciting defensive reactions. In this study, we conducted an online experiment to test the effectiveness of different aspects of moral appeals. To investigate the conditions under which moral appeals are most effective, we manipulated appeal texts along three dimensions: responsibility level (individual vs. collective), time perspective (backward- vs. forward-looking), and appeal type (moral ideals vs. obligations). After reading one of the appeal texts, participants (n = 447) completed an online time estimation task in which they could earn monetary rewards either for themselves (self-gain) or for a climate-friendly charity (charity-gain). In this task, participants were instructed to press the space bar as closely as possible to 3500 ms after the onset of a visual cue that indicated the recipient of the reward in that trial (i.e., self-gain, charity-gain, or no-gain). The study results revealed that participants exposed to individual (vs. collective) responsibility appeals showed greater engagement. In addition, forward-looking appeals were more effective than backward-looking appeals, whereas no differences emerged between moral ideals and obligations. Thus, these results demonstrated that framing moral responsibility as forward-looking and focusing on individual responsibility may enhance the effectiveness of moral appeals in motivating pro-environmental engagement. Furthermore, with this study, we provided further evidence for the idea that not all moral appeals are effective.

• Collected during project

• Experiment

No

• Structured

• English

09/04/2024

09/04/2024

No conflict of interest