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148110 - Fostering ocean empathy through future scenarios.pdf (1 MB)

Fostering ocean empathy through future scenarios

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posted on 2023-05-21, 04:37 authored by Blythe, J, Baird, J, Bennett, N, Dale, G, Kirsty Nash, Pickering, G, Wabnitz, CCC

  1. Empathy for nature is considered a prerequisite for sustainable interactions with the biosphere. Yet to date, empirical research on how to stimulate empathy remains scarce.
  2. Here, we investigate whether future scenarios can promote greater empathy for the oceans. Using a pre-post empathy questionnaire, participants (N = 269) were presented with an optimistic or a pessimistic future scenario for the high seas in a virtual reality (VR) or written format.
  3. Results showed that post-test empathy levels were significantly higher than pre-test levels, indicating that future scenarios fostered ocean empathy. We also find that the pessimistic scenario resulted in greater empathy levels compared to the optimistic scenario. Finally, we found no significant difference between the VR and written conditions and found that empathy scores significantly decreased 3 months after the initial intervention.
  4. As one of the first studies to empirically demonstrate the influence of a purposeful intervention to build ocean empathy, this article makes critical contributions to advancing research on future scenarios and offers a novel approach for supporting ocean sustainability.

History

Publication title

People and Nature

Issue

6

Pagination

1284-1296

ISSN

2575-8314

Department/School

Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies

Publisher

John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Place of publication

United Kingdom

Rights statement

© 2021 The Authors. People and Nature published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Ecological Society. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License, (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Repository Status

  • Open

Socio-economic Objectives

Fisheries - wild caught not elsewhere classified

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    University Of Tasmania

    Categories

    Keywords

    empathyocean futuresscenariosvirtual realitytransformationssustainability

    Licence

    In Copyright

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