How induced controllability affects climate change risk perception and learned helplessness

Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges for humanity in this century. Communicating in a way that raises awareness of the risk climate changes poses while at the same time not inducing negative feelings, like helplessness, is a challenge. Emphasizing the severity of climate change is related to higher risk perception, which could lead to more pro-environmental behavior. That, however, could trigger higher helplessness which is associated with lower motivation to act climate friendly. In our research we investigated the impact of induced controllability of the consequences of climate change on risk perception and learned helplessness. We conducted two experiments with N = 216 (gender-balanced) and N = 482 (quota-based sample) participants in Germany. Participants received six climate change scenarios that differed only in induced controllability (high vs low). There were four conditions: own control, control by government, hopeless, and a control condition. For both experiments results showed that participants’ risk perception increased after they read the scenarios, independent of the conditions. In Experiment 1 learned helplessness decreased for the conditions with high controllability. Surprisingly, for Experiment 2 results showed an overall decrease of learned helplessness independent of the conditions. When adding participants’ ratings on the pro-environmental behavior scale (PEBS-C) as a moderator variable, results showed that those who had higher ratings on the PEBS-C scale reported higher levels of helplessness for the scenario with the lowest controllability, compared to the control group. Our results emphasize the importance of including solutions when addressing the negative impacts of climate change.