Health Professionals as Advocates for Climate and Health Solutions: The Influence of Social Norms on Health Professional Engagement in and Public Support for Climate Advocacy

To address climate change, climate-friendly actions and policies must be implemented. As highly trusted sources of information about climate change and health, health professionals are poised to have an exceptionally important impact on institutional climate-friendly actions and policies through advocacy. Despite this positionality, efforts to engage health professionals in climate advocacy are relatively new and little is yet known about how to do so effectively or how the public perceives such engagement. I conducted a survey experiment with medical societies (Study 1) and field experiments with advocacy organizations (Study 2) to investigate if social normative appeals—both descriptive and dynamic—help encourage health professionals to engage in climate advocacy. I also conducted a survey experiment with the general public (Study 3) to examine if the presence of normative information and the type of advocacy—educating community members, advocating with policymakers, and civil disobedience—influences public perceptions of climate advocacy. In Studies 1 and 2, I found mixed results surrounding the effectiveness of social normative appeals to engage health professionals in climate advocacy, although descriptive normative appeals showed the most promise. InStudy 3, I found that trust in health professionals as a source of information about human health and climate change increased after exposure to the messages, with trust increasing for all conditions except the no norm and civil disobedience condition. Normative information had a main effect on perceptions of health professionals’ credibility, and the type of advocacy had a main effect on perceptions of the acceptability and appropriateness of the action taken, but no interaction effect was found between the two. Together, the findings provide insights into the use of normative appeals for advocacy engagement, deepens current understanding of how the public perceives climate advocacy, and provides guidance for practitioners looking to further engage people in advocacy for climate change and health solutions.

Author

• Campbell, Eryn

• Advocacy
• Climate change communication
• Health Professionals
• Public Perceptions
• Social norms
• Trust

Identifier

hdl:1920/13993

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:MARS:1920/13993