Art can be a tool to help bridge ideological divides climate change in the United States, a new study in the May 31 issue of the journal Nature find. Its five authors say art offers an accessible way to engage with and understand climate change, and that artistic visualizations of data appeal to viewers’ emotions more than standard data graphics. This engagement has the potential to reduce the polarizing effects of the graphics, which can increase skepticism and exacerbate political divisions on climate change.
The peer-reviewed study offers what its authors describe as “pioneering evidence” of this impact. “Such emotional experiences can motivate viewers to reevaluate visualized data that contradicts their beliefs and reduce perceived distance from climate change,” they write. “Our findings not only inform ongoing conversations about how science and art can work together to address the looming environmental crisis, they also suggest new opportunities for climate science practitioners and researchers, in communication, environmental humanities, psychology and sociology to continue collaborating, interdisciplinary work in this area.
To test the effectiveness of artistic representations of the data, the researchers conducted two experiments in which they showed participants artistic and scientific American visuals of the Keeling Curve, which records the buildup of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere. . The total of 671 adults were asked to report their political ideologies, pre-existing concerns about climate change and level of interest in art. The chosen work, titled The heat of summer (2020), by painter and photographer Diane Burko, depicts an abstract map of Europe against a backdrop of melting glaciers, accompanied by a simplified version of the Keeling Curve.
a: The original artwork The heat of summer, 2020, by Diane Burko. b: The edited artwork with the detailed Keeling curve graph. c: The modified and simplified Keeling graph. d The detailed graph of the Keeling curve. Artwork image courtesy of Diane Burko. Graphics courtesy of Nan Li, Isabel I. Villanueva, Thomas Jilk, Brianna Rae Van Matre and Dominique Brossard
In the first experiment, 319 participants reviewed Burko’s original work as well as an edited version of his work with the detailed Keeling graph instead of the simplified graph. They also received two images of the chart alone, one simplified and one detailed. The researchers then asked them to reflect on the works, asking if they felt emotions such as hope, inspiration, guilt, anxiety, fear, or a sense of awe. Participants were then given the four images as mock Instagram posts, complete with informative captions, and asked multiple-choice questions to test their recall. Instagram was chosen because of its outsized role in disseminating infographics, allowing “scientist-artists to reach audiences who visit science museums and art galleries less frequently,” the authors write. study.
Overall, participants experienced stronger positive emotions in response to artistic visualizations than data graphs, the researchers found. They also perceived Instagram posts with the creative images to be as memorable and believable as those with the simple data. Additionally, when asked to reflect on the artistic visualizations, participants were “less politically polarized in their perceived relevance of climate change” than when looking at the graphics. A follow-up study, in which 352 adults only viewed Instagram posts, and were not asked to reflect on those views, found a similar relationship between political orientation and understanding of climate change.
The ability of engaging visuals to tap into emotions and facilitate education on hot topics may come as no surprise to those working in the arts. But having this empirical evidence is important for artists and institutions, especially as creative engagement around the climate crisis increases, says Miranda Massie, founder and director of the Climate Museum, the first museum of its kind in the United States. .
“It will be hugely inspiring for artists to have this social science confirmation of something they already intuitively feel and have seen performed,” she says. “At the Climate Museum, we have actually seen this in how our visitors react quite uniformly to our climate work. The social sciences are always very useful and confirming.
THE Climate Museumwhich opened in 2018, operates through temporary exhibitions and events. He has worked with artists such as Sara Cameron Sunde, Gabriela Salazar and Justin Brice Guariglia to tackle issues of sea level rise, climate inequality and the fossil fuel industry, among others. The exhibits, says Massie, aim to motivate people who are concerned about climate change but don’t know what to do. “We have always seen a secondary benefit in bridging ideological divides,” she adds. “Art opens both our hearts and our minds… by opening people up and making us see our connections to others, inevitably you’re also going to break down some of those senseless divisions that have been fostered by the climate change debate. “
The authors of the Nature recognize that the results obtained from a singular work of art inspired by climate change by an American artist may not apply to all such works. More research, they say, needs to be done to explore various types of science art and their effects on people living outside the United States, especially in communities that are disproportionately affected by climate change.
“It will be great to see other people build on this research, expand it to other places, and explore other questions about community engagement,” says Massie. “The arts have a remarkable power to open people up to scientific information, social information, their sense of belonging and their ability to make a difference. This arts superpower is not something humanity can afford to leave on the ground at this stage of climate change.
