🚨 Animals and plants disappearing
🚨 People losing their homes to sea level rise, storms, and floods
🚨 New diseases appearing and spreading rapidly
🚨 People starving
🚨 Desertification of previously fertile lands
🚨 People living in poverty
🚨 People displaced
🚨 Drought
🚨 Ocean acidification
The list of global issues that are or will impact all places and people is enormous. Certainly much more extensive than the nine examples here.
Let’s be honest. Tackling global issues like these is no easy task, but tackle them we must – and in multiple different ways. To various extents, governments, businesses, stakeholder groups, and individuals all have a role in addressing global issues.
So how should you frame your message on a global issue? Should you be optimistic, or should you be pessimistic? On the one hand, you want to impart the severity of a situation, but on the other, you don’t want people to feel hopeless. Equally, you don’t want people to think that everything is ok either.
The case for pessimistic messaging
Adding gloomy endings to climate change messaging can increase people’s risk perception to a greater extent than using an optimistic ending. What’s more, they’re more likely to believe that their actions can influence the course of climate change.
Similarly, alongside increasing risk perception, pessimistic messaging increases motivation to actually take action that addresses an issue, whereas optimistic messaging can lead to complacency.
The “If it bleeds, it leads” concept that seems to drive much of the mainstream media’s reporting of global issues isn’t entirely without warrant. Shock and fear does grab peoples attention very efficiently.
The case for optimistic messaging
While some studies have found that pessimistic messaging can create greater engagement than optimistic messages, other studies suggest optimistic messages foster engagement for much longer.
Highlighting a chance of a positive outcome can keep people engaged and crucially encourage them to keep taking action and cooperate with others to achieve shared goals.
Constant pessimism can invoke learned helplessness, which in turn demotivates people from taking action and even lead to people avoiding messaging on the issue as much as they can.
It’s not an either-or-situation
Whether someone engages in an optimistic or a pessimistic message can heavily depend on their prior knowledge or belief about an issue, as well as the context in which the message is being presented and the type of behaviour you want to inspire. We tend to favour messages that reinforce what we know, what supports our current world view—and dismiss messages that don’t. .
In essence, you’re unlikely to produce one message or one type of message that reaches everyone. This means understanding your target audience and tailoring your message in a way that will maximise engagement.
With both optimistic and pessimistic messaging having pros and cons, embracing the two styles in your outreach and engagement strategy could be beneficial.
Regardless of whether you use an optimistic or pessimistic message, if your goal is to inspire action, a key piece of your strategy should be to offer people agency.
If people are not aware of an issue or understand it, they are unlikely to take action. If people don’t know what they can do, they are unlikely to take action. If people don’t believe that their efforts can help, they are unlikely to take action.