Humans use art to focus their creative imagination to interpret or reflect reality, convey thoughts and emotions, or provoke new ideas and feelings in others. Art can alter environmental norms, which consist of beliefs, attitudes, and behavior that foster a caring and responsible relationship to the environment in four principal ways: (1) by fostering empathy and stimulating moral imagination, (2) by promoting narrative transportation and increasing cognitive engagement, (3) by providing new symbols for identity construction and stimulating processes of value alignment, and (4) by communicating in public spaces and affording experiential learning within the pedagogical milieu of the arts.
How can creative community leaders, policymakers, and artists utilize art to influence environmental norms in targeted ways? To answer this question, I spoke to Bob Turner, an emeritus Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies at Colgate University. His research has focused on the intersection of art and environmental awareness. I asked Bob what I think are important questions that policymakers and community leaders should be asking.
JP: How do we measure the effectiveness of art that is intended to influence environmental norms and behavior?
BT: It’s hard. In fact, I think it’s impossible to answer the question in general. But it’s possible, though difficult, to answer a narrower question: How do we measure the effectiveness of a particular piece of art on a particular group of people in a particular place over a particular span of time? The particulars of how to measure the impact of exposure to art on attitudes, perceived norms, and intended behaviors will depend on the particular setting: who is being observed, the type of exposure, the length of exposure time, and whether it’s a short-run or long-run effect that one wants to measure. But there are two key issues, regardless of the particulars: measurement should be grounded in behavioral theory, and controlling for confounding factors (other factors that may be correlated with exposure to art) is crucial but difficult.
JP: What are some aspects of the behavioral theory you mention?
BT: Several psychological theories could be the basis for measurement: for example, the Theory of Planned Behavior, Value-Belief-Norm Theory, and norm-activation models. There are also sociological explanations of behavior. Many of these theories have common elements that can inform researchers’ inquiries: people have (no doubt differing) fundamental values, beliefs, and worldviews as well as behavior-specific attitudes; there are relevant norms, both personal and social and both environment-specific and general; there are factors influencing the activation and moderation of values, goals, and norms; and there are constraints that affect the efficacy of all these things on behavioral change. In line with those behavioral theories, researchers have used responses to questionnaires and survey questions to measure attitudes, perceived norms, and behavior.
JP: And how do you control for confounding factors?
BT: That is indeed crucial but difficult: How do we know that any changes we observe after exposure to environmental art are due to the environmental art and not due to other factors that may have also changed along with the exposure to environmental art or due to differing characteristics of those who were exposed versus those who weren’t? To make things even more difficult, these confounding factors are often not observable or measurable themselves. To deal with confounding factors, especially those that are unobservable, one can make comparisons, like a treatment group versus a control group in a medical trial.
An especially promising technique, when it’s available, is to do a before-and-after comparison: measure attitudes, perceived norms, and behavior before and after exposure to environmental art and see what’s changed. This controls for unobserved characteristics of the people being exposed to environmental images, though it’s still possible that other factors influencing the response changed during the exposure.
Or, even better, do what is sometimes called difference-in-difference estimation: compare the amount by which one group changed before and after exposure to the amount by which another group changed. This controls for unobserved characteristics of people as well as things that changed during the time of exposure, if those things happened to all the people being observed.
JP: What does your research suggest about the impact of visual communication aimed at changing environmental attitudes, beliefs, and intended behavior?
BT: My findings are mixed, but I’ve found evidence that short exposure to visual images and text often has a measurable impact, especially on people who don’t already have strongly pro-environmental attitudes and beliefs. It’s suggestive that longer exposure would have even larger effects.
JP: Does visual communication have a special role, versus strictly textual communication?
BT: There’s a literature suggesting reasons why visual imagery might have a larger impact. My own research suggests that, in general, there isn’t much difference in impact on environmental attitudes, beliefs, or intended behaviors between the images and videos I have used and text, though in some cases combining the two seems most effective. But when I looked specifically at people who aren’t already strongly pro-environment, there’s stronger evidence that visual imagery has a larger impact.
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JP: What are the arguments that visual communication has a larger impact?
BT: My own research provides only weak evidence in support of these arguments, but visuals are more likely to create an emotional effect in addition to educating viewers about environmental issues. Text is more likely to work solely through cognitive interest and reasoned choice, which arguably has a lower impact without the emotional effect associated with visual communication. Visual communication may be especially effective in terms of creating motivation through the emotional affect I mentioned earlier.
Videos, in particular, can utilize cinematic literary devices such as narratives, metaphors, and comedy that may stir the types of affective responses that arguably lead to behavioral changes. Videos that integrate environmental activism can also visualize the issue in creative ways that may resonate with viewers, thereby inspiring them to take action.