The Greta Effect: Is there more public support for climate protesters who are young and female?

Abstract

Media portrayals of climate protesters have predominantly painted climate protesters as deviant and antisocial under the protest paradigm, leading to negative reception from public audiences. However, recent years have seen a shift away from negative media portrayals of (climate) protesters and towards an intergenerational justice framing by depicting more young and female protesters in climate protests under a positive light with agency and power. This study investigated whether this shift in visual framing changes audience responses towards climate change. Using photo-editing, we manipulated the gender of depicted climate protesters from different age groups to compare their impact on audiences; we also compared the effect of presence versus absence of police in protest images. A representative sample of UK participants (N = 542) was recruited online and saw one of 10 images before completing several quantitative measures related to climate change and a qualitative question on emotions. Results showed that negative emotional responses towards climate change were greater when seeing images featuring police and child protestors; the latter was related to either feelings of shame and guilt for having created a climate problem for the future generations, or anger towards child exploitation in climate protests. However, varying the content of protest images did not influence other measures of climate attitudes and behaviours. Our results suggest climate images using an intergenerational justice framing implied by youth protestors may at once imbue these protesters with agency and evoke negative emotional responses to climate change amongst audiences. We discuss implications for strategic use of climate communications to promote public engagement.