What the evidence shows

This is a systematic review and meta-analysis addressing a live debate in climate communications: does hope motivate climate engagement, or does it function as "hopium" — a pleasant but demobilizing sedative?

The paper's central contribution is showing that hope is not monolithic — its relationship to engagement depends heavily on what the hope is about (its "target") and, for manipulations, what mechanism is used to induce it. Rather than delivering a single verdict on "does hope help," the authors decompose hope into six target categories (denial, climate change generally, domain-general, message-based, goal-based, action-based) and six manipulation types (status quo frame, societal efficacy, personal efficacy, importance, combined, in-depth), then test whether effects differ across these categories.

The study is explicitly diagnostic rather than prescriptive: it flags where evidence is strong, where it is thin, and where findings are inconclusive.

Key Findings

• The target of hope mattered enormously: hope about taking personal action correlated most strongly with engagement (r = 0.40), while hope grounded in denial that climate change is a problem correlated negatively with engagement (r = −0.40).

• Measured hope overall was positively but modestly correlated with climate engagement (r = 0.13 across all 46 studies; r = 0.18 when restricted to the 39 correlational studies).

• Hope manipulations (experimental inductions) produced only a small overall effect on engagement (Cohen's d = 0.08), and this varied by type: in-depth experiential interventions (e.g., simulations, training) showed the strongest effect (d = 0.49, k = 2), personal efficacy manipulations were marginally positive (d = 0.18, k = 2), while status quo framing had a marginally negative effect (d = −0.19, k = 3) and societal efficacy messaging (the most common manipulation type, k = 12) had essentially no effect (d = 0.05).

Stand out data points

• r = 0.40 vs. r = −0.40: hope about taking personal action correlates positively with engagement, while denial-based hope ("things aren't that bad") correlates equally strongly in the negative direction — same construct, opposite targets, opposite outcomes.

• d = 0.49 vs. d = 0.05: in-depth experiential hope interventions vastly outperformed the most common manipulation type (societal efficacy messaging), which showed no detectable effect at all.

• d = 0.08 overall manipulation effect: even the average effect of deliberately trying to induce hope on engagement was small and only barely statistically significant (p = 0.04), a useful caution against assuming hope-based messaging is a strong lever.

Examples of how Understories uses this research

• Hope Doom Balance Core relevance: provides an evidence-based caution that simply adding "hope" to a message is not reliably effective, and that status quo framing can backfire — critical nuance for this criterion.

• Solution focus Nuanced: generic "society can solve this" (societal efficacy) framing showed no measurable engagement lift, cautioning against assuming all solution-focused messaging is equally effective.

• Beneficence The findings support helping advocates avoid wasted effort on ineffective "hopeful" messaging (e.g., generic societal efficacy appeals) and instead direct them toward evidence-backed approaches (action-focused hope, personal efficacy), aligning impact with integrity.

• Non-maleficence: The report shows that hope framed as "things aren't so bad" (denial hope) actively suppresses engagement, which is important for Understories to warn against; also useful in cautioning that some superficially uplifting messages provide no benefit and could waste communicators' resources.

— non-exhaustive.

Key quote

On the incidental-hope hypothesis: Iit is possible that manipulations are increasing climate engagement due to some other process unrelated to hope, and also separately increasing hope."

 © 2023 Geiger, Dwyer and Swim — CC BY (Creative Commons Attribution License).

Last update: 20 August 2026

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