Abstract
Humanity is facing urgent and wide-spread environmental destruction from human-induced climate change and biodiversity loss. At the same time, a majority of the human population lives in urban areas and spends most of the time indoors, despite the growing evidence of health benefits of spending time in nature. Nature connectedness has been linked with both pro environmental behaviour and increased well-being and mental health. As such, research into nature connectedness seems to target two areas of current crises.
This thesis explores whether fictional stories can increase nature connectedness and inspire pro-environmental behaviour. Storytelling, and particularly transportation into narratives, has been shown to affect people’s emotions, attitudes, and behaviours, and stories can provide indirect, mediated nature contact to people lacking regular direct contact with nature. These aspects make stories a promising, yet unexplored, venue for increasing nature connectedness and, potentially, pro-environmental behaviour and personal well-being. This study provides evidence that (fictional) stories indeed can increase nature connectedness. This is true both for stories set in nature and stories set completely indoors (with conservation related themes), although the increase in nature connectedness takes different routes depending on condition: The story set in nature directly increased nature connectedness, while for the story set indoors, narrative transportation mediated the increase in nature connectedness. No conclusive evidence was found for pro-environmental behaviour (intentions). Pre-existing nature connectedness and pro-environmental behaviour intentions significantly predicted both their respective post-test score and narrative transportation, and for both story conditions, narrative transportation predicted nature connectedness and pro-environmental behaviour intentions alike. This implies that high narrative transportation should be a priority for anyone developing stories intending to increase nature connectedness or pro-environmental behaviours. Thus, in addition to the usefulness of stories for increasing people’s connection to nature, the results stress the importance of high story quality for such interventions, as well as a critical awareness of writers’ own values and cultural background in relationship to the aims of the research or communication. Future researchers and science communicators are advised to delegate the writing of stories and other treatment texts to professional creative writers. More research is advised on the mechanisms through which the increases in nature connectedness take place, and the conditions required for fictional stories to significantly increase pro-environmental behaviour intentions and direct pro-environmental behaviour.
Apart from the academic research study, this thesis includes a creative component. This is the fictional adventure short story Through the Glow-wormhole, which also was used as foundation for the treatment stories developed for the research study. The advice established in the academic part for writing high-quality science stories was applied in the development of the creative component.