A letter to future generations: Examining the effectiveness of an intergenerational framing intervention

Recent scholarship on the antecedents of proenvironmental behavior has revealed legacy motivation and perceptions of responsibility as two key pathways for promoting reductions in personal contributions to climate change. In the current investigation, we examined whether both of these constructs independently relate to proenvironmental behaviors. We then tested the efficacy of a set of related interventions targeting each of these two mechanisms independently. Participants (n = 661) either wrote a letter to their child in the future or wrote a climate essay detailing the threats of climate change. In both conditions (relative to a control condition), participants reported feeling a greater responsibility to reduce climate change and stronger intentions to engage in proenvironmental behaviors. However, only participants who wrote a letter to their child in the future reported increased legacy motivation and chose to have a greater part of their bonus donated to a proenvironmental charity. Increased legacy motivation (for the letter condition) and perceptions of responsibility to reduce climate change (for the letter and climate essay conditions) explained (i.e., mediated) part of the treatment effects on these outcomes. However, a week later, participants across both conditions did not differ in their self-reports of actual proenvironmental behavior engagement suggesting that stronger and more frequent intervention is required to produce sustained effects over time.