“Well, if they’re an environmental activist, then I should be one too”: an open-science, disrupt-then-reframe approach to stimulating pro-environmental intentions

Social comparison can be limiting to pro-environmental action, as people use the perceived inaction of others to excuse their own inaction. The disrupt-then-reframe (DtR) technique can disrupt thought
processes and increase a person’s susceptibly to persuasion. We investigate how participants’ proenvironmental behaviour (PEB) intentions were affected when exposed to discourse attributed to a ‘stereotypical’ vs. ‘atypical’ environmentalist (vs. control). We predict that exposure to the ‘atypical’ environmentalist will render people more persuadable and lead to higher PEB intentions versus the other conditions.