We are currently undergoing a climate emergency and are at the verge point where we can still act to de-accelerate climate change and reverse some of the deleterious effects of human activity on the planet’s health. This entails behavior change and quickly informed communication and intervention strategies that affect people’s motivation and behavior with impact on the planet.

While not all, much of the behavior that impacts the planet juxtaposes with behavior related to ethical concerns on the treatment of sentient animals (e.g. avoiding meat consumption or purchasing fur) or concerns about the impact of consumption on economically and socially vulnerable populations (e.g. fair trade) or concerns about human populations that depend on the forest and are affected by its disappearance or by flooding and landslides that are a consequence of soil depletion from its vegetable cover.

While various independent data sources point to meat production as a major contributor to the CO2 footprint and global warming, most information conveyed to the general public has been focused on the footprint of transports and on the transition to “clean energy”. Additionally, recent research has shown that people across the world are for the most part unaware of the suffering of farmed animals for meat or dairy production. Youth are highly concerned with the environment but children’s schoolbooks present meat consumption as essential for human nutrition, thereby conveying conflicting information that may be hindering decisive changes in ethical and pro-environmental behavior.

Empathy, both as a trait and as an affective and cognitive process, has been known to associate with a variety of prosocial behaviors – e.g. animal directed empathy has been associated with adopting plant-based diets and trait empathy with adherence to self and other protective norms during the Covid 19 pandemic.

Empathy is also highest in females, and some of its dimensions are higher during adolescence than in adulthood, so both adolescents and young adults are promising targets for interventions toward pro-environmental behavior and ethical consumption based on empathy for human and animal targets. A variety of Media and sensory experiences have been tested as a means to improve empathy, including literature, movies, video games, exposure to the target and target artistic representations. Since behavior changes are due to interacting variables, it is also important to understand how empathy interacts with other variables to promote motivational change.

The goal of this research topic is to bring together research that explores the role of different types of media in enhancing empathy toward animal suffering as a result of human activity, and toward human suffering resulting from climate change and from assaults on the environment (e.g. deforestation, pollution) to align the best media resources to promote empathy that motivates animal cruelty-free purchases and food habits, and a gamut of pro-environmental actions (e.g. ranging from recycling to avoiding pollutant sources of energy and transportation to purchasing recycled goods or avoiding the purchase of products sourcing non-certified wood or palm oil).

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Frontiers in Psychology

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