CCPP Director Erik C. Nisbet, Owen L. Coon Professor of Policy Analysis and Communication at Northwestern University, is a co-author on a new article in Nature Climate Change that rigorously tests the persuasiveness of the most influential climate change messaging strategies in the scholarly literature.
The study directly engages with Nisbet’s 2011 Communication Research study, which ranks among the 10 most cited climate change messaging studies and helped shape how scholars and practitioners think about framing, persuasion, and public engagement on climate issues. Rather than assuming these widely cited strategies remain effective, the new research systematically evaluates how well they actually perform today.
Across five replication studies (N = 3,216) and a large registered-report megastudy (N = 13,544), the authors tested the effects of the 10 most-cited climate change messages on Americans’ pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors. The results show modest but meaningful persuasive effects: six messages significantly influenced multiple preregistered attitudes, typically shifting opinions by 1–4 percentage points. Effects were largely similar across partisan groups, challenging expectations that climate messages work primarily through partisan targeting.
At the same time, the study highlights clear limits to messaging. None of the tested messages increased pro-environmental donations, suggesting that costly behaviors are difficult to move with short-form communication alone. In addition, the most effective messages appeared to operate through multiple psychological pathways, making it difficult to isolate a single persuasive mechanism.
Together, the findings reinforce the importance of empirically testing even the most established communication strategies. The article exemplifies CCPP’s commitment to replication, cumulative science, and evidence-based insights into how communication shapes public responses to climate change, while offering a sober assessment of both the promise and the limits of messaging in advancing climate action.