https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1058-7493
Figures
Abstract
Our understanding of who museums reach, and how effective these institutions are in communicating climate change, is not well studied. Moreover, museums focusing solely on the issue of climate change are rare. We present an analysis of the Climate Museum, the first U.S. museum focused on climate change, which combines art, learning, and opportunities for action. We collected pre-post survey data (n = 143) as well as conducted qualitative interviews (n = 39) with visitors over a six-month period. We found that visitors – more than 80% of whom were Alarmed about climate change – were more determined and confident in speaking about climate change, more hopeful it can be solved, and clearer about how much others are concerned, after visiting the museum. Our qualitative analysis complements these findings and identifies three key themes visitors learned about and planned to share with others: the intertwining of climate change and social inequality, the history of deception by the fossil fuel industry, and the prevailing public opinion when it comes to who is concerned about climate change. Our findings provide important foundational evidence that climate-oriented museums have an important role to play engaging various publics on climate change. There is an opportunity for museums to present not just ‘the science’ of climate change, but the important social dimensions and implications that climate impacts will have on the world.
Citation: Badullovich N, Nesci A, Massie M, Kotcher J, Maibach E (2025) Communicating about “The End of Fossil Fuel” in a museum setting: a mixed-methods investigation of the climate museum. PLOS Clim 4(2): e0000518. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000518
Editor: Jamie Males, PLOS Climate, UNITED KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN AND NORTHERN IRELAND
Received: October 7, 2024; Accepted: January 3, 2025; Published: February 19, 2025
Copyright: © 2025 Badullovich et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Data Availability: All data can be found in the manuscript and Supporting Information files.
Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.
Competing interests: I have read the journal's policy and the authors of this manuscript have the following competing interests: EM is on the Climate Museum's advisory council.
Introduction
Swift and unified action on climate change will be necessary if the world intends to stay below the original Paris Agreement target of no more than 1.5 oC of global warming [1,2]. As global temperature increases, climate impacts like extreme weather events, loss of ecosystems, and health risks become much more likely and widespread [2,3]. Building active public support is key to fostering political will and bringing about enduring climate policy aimed at reducing carbon emissions and implementing resilience measures [4–6]. However, public support itself is not a given, and in many cases needs to be cultivated through intentional methods such as communication and engagement with the issue of climate change.
One essential way of cultivating public support and mounting an effective societal response to climate change is through good communication. Communicating about climate change can involve many different goals (e.g., informing, persuading, changing attitudes, fostering behaviors etc.) and therefore can happen in a variety of settings [7]. Some communication settings, like classrooms, are more formal and education-focused, while others are more informal; these include discussions with friends and family, visits to museums, watching tv programs, and many others. More broadly, this distinction is made to demarcate learning environments from formal which tend to be the traditional classroom setting, to informal learning environments outside of a formal classroom, like museums, in the home, and through clubs or organizations (to name a few) [8]. Some scholars argue that the vast majority of the average person’s science engagement takes place in informal learning environments with a lack of climate learning happening in formal settings, meaning informal learning environment are essential settings where people engage with the issue of climate change [9,10]. Although many museums and science centers include information about Earth’s climate, few are solely dedicated to communicating about the issue of climate change [11]. Moreover, museum goals in many cases may center on increasing topic knowledge, which is important but generally considered to be only one factor influencing one’s attitudes and behaviors with respect to climate change [12]. Hence, there is a gap in what we know about the role and effectiveness of museum exhibitions focused specifically on climate change in cultivating public support and action.
Museums and science centers are arguably some of the most important environments for learning about science and subjects originating in science – including climate change – reaching millions of Americans every year [13]. As documented by Schiele [14], science focused museums have a long history of evolution from communicating mostly science and technology to now addressing social dimensions of science [15]. This is owing to the fact that museums strive to be to spaces where people can learn about topics and then come to their own conclusions based on that information [16]. Falk [9] has referred to this notion as ‘free-choice’ learning (i.e., informal learning) and notes that the U.S. has an abundance of these institutions (examples being zoos, libraries, natural history museums, and so on). Moreover, museums tend to be regarded as very trustworthy in the U.S. both generally and in the context of scientific topics, almost to the same extent as ‘friends and family’ and overwhelmingly more so than social media and governments [16,17]. Some of the reasons for this include the perception that museums are generally non-partisan or neutral and fact-based [18]. This allows museums to act as important contexts of learning on many topics, including science, and where the visitor is in control of how they wish to engage with the material [19].
Museums and climate change
Museums have the potential to be important and persuasive communication sources on climate change. Geiger et al. [20] found through a multi-year study that visitors who hear about climate change in museum presentations – specifically by presenters who are trained in how to communicate it effectively through techniques like strategic framing – tend to be more hopeful about their ability to take action with others, as well as engage in climate change conversation and participate in a climate organization. Moreover, visitors that attended these institutions were more likely than non-visitors (or visitors who attended museums without presenters who participated in the training) to participate in personal consumer actions (e.g., taking public transportation) and civic actions (e.g., donating money to environmental groups) [21]. A related study from Geiger et al. [22] aimed to assess whether a climate change knowledge intervention in an informal learning environment could promote climate discussion. The study found that knowledge-based interventions – emphasizing the causal mechanisms of climate change and community-level solutions – can increase self and response efficacy beliefs, leading to higher willingness to discuss climate change [22]. While there are studies that aim to assess climate-related exhibitions or information in these settings, there is a complete lack of evaluation when it comes to museums focused specifically on climate change, being partly due to there being so few examples [23]. One potential reason for the scarcity of climate-focused museums is the political environment around the issue. A study from Henry and Carter [24] of small and medium-sized museums communicating about climate change in Michigan (USA) highlighted that the ‘politically charged’ or controversial nature of climate change was a key barrier in implementing more climate information in exhibits. Additional potential barriers to climate programming in museums include having a lack of time to produce the exhibits, funding for those exhibits, and lack of partnerships [24]. As argued by Sutton p.633 [25] “they [museums] are answers to the question ‘how do we get out of this climate crisis?’ but museums are not yet acting as answers.” The Climate Museum is an example of an institution aiming to provide helpful societal answers, centered around what Newell p.600 [23] calls “New Museology” which is highly participatory and dialogic in its approach, and involves storytelling. Given that the Climate Museum is the focus of this study, we provide a short background and overview of the museum for context, before stepping through the details of our mixed-methods research study.
The Climate Museum
The Climate Museum – legally chartered in New York state in 2015 – is the first museum dedicated to climate change in the United States (and was one of only two in the world at its founding). A number of new climate-focused institutions have since been created, and cultural institutions including zoos, botanical gardens, heritage organizations, libraries, and museums have begun to direct increasing attention to climate-themed programming. The Climate Museum employs a cultural activist approach, using art and pedagogy to create concrete civic action opportunities in all of its exhibitions. It seeks to mobilize the emotional power of the arts and their role in building a sense of community for public facing, tangible action on the crisis, with the ultimate goal of contributing to a shift in public culture to support climate action at scale. The exhibits at the Climate Museum have been created based on current science and draw on a variety of authoritative sources such as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports and international scientific journals [26–31]. This evidence-based approach has ensured the exhibits have been firmly grounded in the science and this has been complemented with best practices in exhibit design to create exhibits that strike a balance between factual information delivery and creating a memorable experience for the visitor.
The Museum’s theory of change is to use the popularity and trust held by museums to mobilize action, particularly among the majority of Americans who support climate policy but are largely silent and have not yet taken civic action [32–34]. The museum frames visitor experience with visual arts, using their prosocial power – established by research in neuroaesthetics [35] – to intervene in visitors’ emotional and social experiences related to climate change, while enhancing understanding of specific climate-related topics. The goal of this approach is to provide visitors with a better understanding of their own agency as individuals and as members of a community taking civic action on climate. Put another way, the goal is to enhance individual and collective efficacy around climate and justice, thereby helping to foster pro-climate action. Exhibitions and programs succeed if they result in a deeper understanding not only of substantive issues, but also of everyone’s capacity to create a ripple effect that breaks through barriers like climate silence [36].
Since its founding in 2015, the museum has reached over 150,000 in-person visitors and explored subjects such as the meaning of home in the climate crisis, climate migration, the youth climate movement, and pathways and barriers to limiting global warming to 1.5 oC. Most of the museum’s programs (including 13 past exhibitions) have taken place in short-term spaces, indoors and outdoors, in New York City. The most recent exhibition “The End of Fossil Fuel” – active over the course of this study – was a seven-month-long exhibition in NYC’s SoHo neighborhood examining the fossil fuel industry’s roots in colonialism and transatlantic slavery and presenting challenging information about the industry’s behavior and influence. The exhibition also featured histories of the climate and environmental justice movements, social science studies of the climate justice supermajority in the US, and other information supporting optimism, agency, and action. It was grounded by a 45-foot-long mural (Fig 1C) that depicted the struggle for and transition to a safe and just future. A series of interactive maps allowed visitors to engage with the deep connections between climate and inequality on the global, national, and New York City scales (e.g., Fig 1B), and informational panels incorporating photographs and quotations provided visitors with footholds for learning.
(A) Action-sticker wall; (B) New York City redlining map; (C) a portion of the 45-foot mural. photos supplied by the climate museum with permission.
The exhibition culminated in an action sticker wall (Fig 1A) where visitors made commitments to civic action on climate and could visualize themselves as part of a large collective over time as stickers accumulated on the wall. The exhibition also included a reflection wall where people shared what climate justice means to them, a kids corner with guided art activities, and a postcard station where visitors of all ages were able to write postcards to elected officials and others expressing support for climate action. Three exhibition educators led field trips and guided tours that ended at the action stations, as well as engaging informally with walk-in visitors to encourage civic action. In summary, the exhibition had a central educational objective to build understanding not just of topics relating to climate change such as the fossil fuel industry and climate justice, but also of social realities bearing on efficacy, including the majority support for renewable energy and climate policy [33]. To be specific, the concept of climate change that informed the museum and this study centered around the accelerated change of climatic conditions (such as temperatures and weather patterns) as a result of rapid greenhouse gas emissions [2]. Taken together, the exhibition’s elements create a novel and emotionally immersive experience designed to reach a different audience and achieve a different set of goals than traditional climate programming at museums.
Research questions
The Climate Museum (in New York City) is one example – and in fact, the first in the US – of a museum focused specifically on climate change and its solutions with a primary goal of activating behavioral change. Hence, given that this a relatively new phenomenon, there is an opportunity to investigate who visits and what kind of impact a climate-centered museum can have on visitors. We conducted a mixed-method study of visitors’ views on climate change, including a quantitative survey before and after their visit (RQs 1–2) combined with short qualitative interviews conducted after their visit (RQs 3–5), in an attempt to answer our guiding research questions.
- RQ1: What are the characteristics of visitors to the Climate Museum with respect to their demographics and prior climate-related beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors?
- RQ2: To what extent does attending “The End of Fossil Fuels” exhibition at the Climate Museum, affect visitors’ beliefs, attitudes, and intentions to take action on climate change?
- RQ3: What key information or ideas do visitors take away with them after visiting the museum?
- RQ4: What key information or ideas do visitors intend to share with others following their visit to the museum?
- RQ5: Which displays are most engaging for visitors?
Methods
Pre-post survey
A pre-post survey instrument was developed and used (all data collection and consent procedures for the quantitative and qualitative components were approved by George Mason University’s Institutional Review Board: 2101938-2) to assess a range of visitors’ climate-relevant beliefs, attitudes, emotions, and demographics. These constructs were selected both for their theoretical relevance and for their potential applicability to evaluations of other museum programming on climate change. We tested the survey on several occasions within both organizations to ensure the questions were understandable and appropriate operationalizations of the constructs we were interested in. Data collection occurred over the period of 13th October 2023 – 29th April 2024. Analysis was conducted in the statistical software Jamovi [37].
Method and recruitment
The baseline survey was deployed in the museum with visitors giving consent through the online survey. Visitors were invited to participate in the survey upon entry to the museum provided the visitor was over the age of 18. Museum staff provided the study link as a QR code and explained that the survey was part of a research project. Visitors were then free to scan and complete the survey if they chose or complete the survey on a museum-supplied tablet device. Upon completing the baseline survey, participants were asked (through a survey question) if they would be willing to receive a follow-up survey (i.e., post-component of this study) via email. If they said yes, they provided their email address, and a survey link was automatically emailed 24 hours after they submitted their baseline survey responses. Both surveys were hosted via the Qualtrics platform, and we implemented a unique identifier as meta-data to connect baseline and follow-up responses. Museum staff offered the baseline survey to as many visitors as they practically could.
Participants and retention
All participants were required to be at least 18 years old. After removing incomplete responses (i.e., those that dropped out of the survey) the final number of responses was n = 1273 for the baseline and n = 143 for the follow-up which resulted in a retention rate of 11.2%.
Measures
Most measures were asked in both the baseline and post-test survey. For simplicity, we refer to these as our main dependent variables (Table 1). However, some additional questions were asked only in the baseline or follow-up survey (Table 3).
Our main dependent variable items were designed with two main considerations in mind: having variables that could (a) provide evaluative insight into the effects of the museum’s exhibition and address the Museum’s objectives, and (b) be comprehensive in measuring a variety of useful and climate-relevant psychological constructs. For parsimony and consistency, we implemented a consistent response scale for every key dependent variable: Very strongly disagree (1), Strongly disagree (2), Moderately disagree (3), Slightly disagree (4), Neither agree nor disagree (5), Slightly agree (6), Moderately agree (7), Strongly agree (8), and Very strongly agree (9). The categories of variables consisted of beliefs, efficacy, norms, emotions, and behavioral intentions.
Six Americas classification
We used the 4-item Six Americas Short SurveY (SASSY) in order to categorize participants into one of six interpretive communities: Alarmed, Concerned, Cautious, Disengaged, Doubtful, and Dismissive [38]. The questions (Table 2) are about global warming worry, importance, perceived harm to self, and perceived harm to future generations and are used to derive a score that enables sorting a participant into one of the categories. The original questions use the term ‘global warming’ although we exchanged this for ‘climate change’ as it was more relevant for the context of this study. A past study with an Australian sample of participants shows no difference in categorization patterns when comparing questions that use global warming versus climate change [39]. Moreover, in the US context, there are no studies yet indicating that using ‘climate change’ should yield different results. Hence, we feel confident in our decision to use climate change for these questions, instead of global warming. We used this variable for descriptive analysis of the sample and not as a dependent variable with means and standard deviations in the results section. The response scale for these questions differed from our main dependent variables, the four questions and their response scales were as follows:
Demographic and other questions
We also included some additional questions in the survey which included demographic (age, gender, race and ethnicity, and country of residence). The survey instrument was constructed be as applicable as possible to other museum contexts, however, we included some additional questions relevant to aims of the partner organization, these included:
Qualitative interviews
To recruit participants, museum visitors over the age of 18 were approached by museum staff towards the end of their visit and asked if they wished to participate in a short interview. Given that the aims and interview questions were different from the survey, we did not restrict participation based on whether a visitor had completed the survey component or not.
Interviews took place in the museum and verbal consent was given by the participant after being briefed with the study information. The interviewer asked the participant if they consented to participate and be recorded. The interview only proceeded if the participant verbally responses in the affirmative. The interview guide was designed intentionally to be brief (around five minutes) to strike a balance between our interest in collecting additional data and the visitor’s interest in completing their visit to the museum. The interviews typically lasted around three to five minutes. The interviews were conducted by trained museum staff and audio was recorded. In total, 39 interviews were conducted and analyzed.
Interview guide
The interview guide contained the following questions for visitors:
- What brought you into the Climate Museum today?
- Are there any key ideas or knowledge that you’re taking away today based on your visit?
- What, if anything, do you think you’ll share with others based on your visit today?
- Were there any displays that really stood out to you?
- Follow-up: Is there anything you would have liked to have seen more of?
- Is there anything else you’d like to add or tell us about your experience today?
Transcription and analysis
Interview audio was transcribed using Sonix.ai (https://sonix.ai/), an online transcription service that uses artificial intelligence to turn audio files into transcripts. Transcripts were carefully reviewed against the audio to check accuracy and add punctuation to aid in analysis. Interview transcripts were then imported into the software program MaxQDA24 (https://www.maxqda.com/new-maxqda-24) for analysis.
A thematic analysis approach was used following the general guidelines from Braun and Clarke [40,41] and conducted by the first author. Each question of the interview guide was analyzed individually in order to generate a list of codes. Coding followed an inductive process where passages were freely coded based almost entirely on semantic meaning with some codes created based on inferred or latent meaning [42]. Following the coding process, similar codes were grouped into themes under each question. Doing this for each question allowed us to clearly spot consistent themes across questions – hence our desire to code each question individually as opposed to code the entire transcript in one pass.
Results
Survey
Sample description.
To answer RQ1, Table 4 describes the survey participants in terms of demographics and Six Americas status. Two different sample values are reported in Table 4 which represent the full sample (n = 1273), and the second column represents the follow-up sample (n = 143) of visitors that completed both baseline and follow-up surveys. For the baseline sample (n = 1273) in terms of age, 20% were 18–24, 40% were 25–34, 13% were 35–44, 8% were 45–54, 7% were 55–64, and 7% were 65+. In terms of gender, 56% were women, 37% were men, and 3% identifying as another or multiple genders. Just over half of visitors were White, non-Hispanic at 57%, Asian, non-Hispanic at 16%, Hispanic at 11%, Black, non-Hispanic at 5%, with 4% being visitors identifying as having another or two or more races. The vast majority of visitors were from the United States (84%) with the second most frequent country of residence being Canada (2%). In total, visitors represented 40 different countries that spanned all inhabited continents (i.e., Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North/South America). Most visitors – based on their responses – were categorized as Alarmed (82%) or Concerned (15%). The remaining four segments of Cautious, Doubtful, Disengaged, and Dismissive together comprised only 3% of the sample.
Pre-post analyses
To answer RQ2, a series of paired t-tests were used to compare responses at baseline and follow-up among participants who completed both waves of the survey. Paired t-tests are an appropriate analysis choice in this case given this is a within-subjects comparison and t-test are fairly robust against violations of the normality assumption. We inspected Q-Q plots and did not observe any significant violations of the assumptions of normality for these analyses. Additionally, we conducted an attrition analysis to determine whether there were any notable differences among the sample of participants who completed both the baseline and follow-up compared to those who completed just the baseline. In short, we did not observe any major differences among the samples to threaten validity or warrant any adjustments or weighting (the results of the attrition analysis can be found in S1 Table in the supplementary materials).
In total, five of the variables were significantly higher at follow-up relative to baseline (see Table 5): social norm (people in my country are concerned) (Cohen’s d = 0.65, p <.001), collective action understanding (Cohen’s d = 0.34, p <.001), hope (Cohen’s d = 0.27, p =.002), determined to talk (Cohen’s d = 0.21, p =.013), confidence in talking (Cohen’s d = 0.18, p =.037).
Interviews.
There were three common themes visitors reported as key takeaways and that they would share with others following their visit: the linkages between climate change and social justice, fossil fuel industry influence, and updated social norms perceptions. These three themes are explored first with respect to RQs 3–5 and then additional themes present in the data are presented. The presence of “[…]” indicates a break between quoted sections intended to improve clarity of meaning. We report the three cross-cutting themes here with additional less-prominent themes presented in the supplementary materials S2 Table and S1 Fig.
Climate and social justice
The topic of climate justice was a prominent take-away message for visitors given the explicit design choices in the museum aimed at linking climate change and social inequality. While climate justice is becoming a more prominent topic of discussion, it is still a fairly unknown concept in the American public’s mind [43]. Many visitors identified ideas and information relating to climate justice as a key takeaway with some visitors learning this information for the first time. Some visitors also noted that it is a topic they had not heard or read about before while others said they already knew about it and felt it was a key communicated idea in the museum.
“I honestly did not know the racial correlation was so intense […] I honest didn’t know I was going to be walking into that. But I’m happy to now be very aware of it.” (IP19)
“I think the main thing I learned was how you guys did a really good job explaining the deep history of climate and ties to colonialism and inequality.” (IP23)
“The importance of the environmental justice in all of this is definitely highlighted in the museum. And I think it’s important for the general environmental movement.” (IP22)
“I am taking away the social justice aspect of the whole issue, which I think is really well interwoven throughout the content.” (IP25)
Other visitors attended the museum with the goal of learning more about the topic for a class assignment – or educators encouraging their students to attend – and climate justice was something that they found useful in this case. This tied into a more general theme that the museum can be considered very valuable learning spaces.
“We don’t talk about climate justice all that much in the class […] So this was a really nice way to fill that […] gap in the class.” (IP2)
Climate justice was also one of the more frequently mentioned ideas that visitors said they would be sharing with others. In some cases, visitors also mentioned it would be a topic they would explore further after their visit.
“I’m definitely going to share the racial impact that is surrounding the climate change.” (IP19)
“Climate justice. The idea of climate justice. How it impacts especially low-income people of color. I think that’s the most important part of it.” (IP5)
We can gain insight into how the concept of climate justice became clearly embedded as a key sharing topic through some visitors calling out specific exhibits that they felt made the point clearly. More broadly, there were many instances where visitors identified the use of maps as being a highlight and something they also wanted to see more of.
“What’s interesting is this map over there […] to see the inequalities between the people or countries causing the most emissions and the ones that are suffering. I mean, I knew it, but I think it’s really well illustrated. And in particular […] the map of the US and New York.” (IP17)
“So I took a picture of the […] New York City zip code temperature map. I thought that was […] a really clear way how historical legacy impacts present day experiences […] I think that’s a really crisp, great way that it displays that information.” (IP32)
Fossil fuel industry influence
The second common theme centered around the fossil fuel industry and their influence. Within this theme, there were ideas related specifically to the industry’s deceptive communication practices like seeding doubt in the existence of climate change despite clear scientific evidence to the contrary [44,45]. Some visitors stated that some of the key information they were taking from their visit to the museum was knowledge about some of the deceptive practices by the fossil fuel industry to control narratives around climate change.
“I really liked the part on how long the fossil fuel industry has known about these issues and seeing actual examples of the disinformation campaigns they’ve done. It’s quite striking. You know, a lot of people will try and claim [...] these companies are actually doing things, but they’re doing pretty nefarious practice for quite a few decades now.” (IP34)
Other visitors reflected more broadly on the inherent embeddedness of the fossil fuel industry in society. This included a recognition of the power wielded by fossil fuel companies when it comes to political support and government lobbying.
“This [fossil fuel industry influence] is the biggest one. I mean, I know this is in our everyday life, but I never thought of it because it’s like, just embedded in your life. I never think about it” (IP24)
“I think just a lot of funding that politicians are getting from the fossil fuel industry and how that’s impacting legislation.” (IP15)
“I know that in America there’s like a lot of lobbying by the big fossil fuel companies, but I didn’t know that even at the level of the UN, the same problem persists.” (IP6)
The ideas of deep societal embeddedness and power wielded by the fossil fuel industry carried over into responses to the question of what visitors would share with others. Specifically, around the practices of government lobbying and previous knowledge of climate change by fossil fuel companies.
“Definitely the international lobbying problem of fossil fuels… and I think the exhibit was nice on portraying how fossil fuel is at the heart of this whole problem.” (IP16)
“I definitely will share some knowledge about the fossil fuel industry and how they do some lobbying in the politics, and how they try to hide the scientific knowledge about the impact they [are] causing.” (IP18)
Given the museum had some discrete exhibits set up to communicate this information, visitors tended to specifically reference those exhibits when conveying their ideas on the actions of fossil fuel companies.
“I like the display on the history of ExxonMobil and their documents going back to the ‘80s.” (IP23)
Updated social norms perceptions
The final cross-cutting theme from the interview data was the idea after visiting, participants had an updated perception of social norms around how much the American public cares about climate change. It is an important theme that captures the idea that visitors left believing that more people care about climate change and climate action than they previously thought.
“The fact that there is a large amount of people who do support the abandonment of fossil fuels […] that was just very empowering because I felt so small.” (IP30)
“there’s a panel about the number or like- percentages of people who care about climate change, and it’s a lot higher than I expected.” (IP8)
Visitors learning about climate change public opinion and the fact there is more agreement than they thought encouraged some to want to share this information with others. In some cases, the ‘action-sticker’ exhibit, which allowed visitors to write an action that they commit to doing and stick it onto the wall, may have inspired these responses.
“The action stickers, for sure. I think it’s kind of refreshing to see that people care. […] it feels like people don’t really talk to each other as much anymore. But seeing the stickers and […] the engagement with the postcards as well really […] reminds me of how many people do care and really want to do something about it.” (IP13)
Discussion
This study aimed to understand the visitor profile of the Climate Museum, the first of its kind in the United States focused specifically on climate change, and to evaluate how well it is achieving its educational and engagement objectives. The Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University and the Climate Museum partnered together to co-develop a pre-post survey instrument and qualitative interview guide and collected data on visitor experiences. Our goal was to understand the effects of the museum on visitors concerning various climate-relevant psychological constructs.
Our survey data suggested that after visiting the museum, visitors had higher levels of hope that climate change could be addressed, a better understanding that most people in the US are concerned about climate change, a clearer understanding of how collective action works, and greater determination and confidence to speak about climate change. Our interview data – designed to understand what visitors took away with them and were likely to share with others – identified three key cross-cutting themes. The first was the importance of climate justice, the second was the fossil fuel industry’s influence and deceitful communication practices, and the third was a clearer understanding that most Americans are concerned about climate change – more than they previously thought. Below, we discuss three main points that are most pertinent to our research questions and best highlight the impact institutions such as the Climate Museum have on visitors.
Museums have the potential to help activate the Alarmed
The first noteworthy point pertains to the study sample composition. The vast majority (more than 82%) of visitors fell into the Alarmed segment of the Global Warming’s Six Americas classification, indicating they are strongly convinced of the reality of climate change and the danger it poses in the present and the future, and feel a desire to act [38,46]. As a result, some survey questions returned very high baseline scores (e.g., anger towards efforts to inhibit climate action, mean = 8.62) which presents potential challenges in detecting a statistically significant difference in the follow-up survey. Despite an overwhelmingly Alarmed sample, we still found that visitors who attended the Climate Museum reported greater feelings of hope, confidence and determination to talk about climate change, an updated social norm of climate concern, and collective action understanding. This suggests there is value in targeting the Alarmed segment for the purposes of cultivating action – provided the right constructs are targeted by communication in trying to move this segment in a desired direction [47]. An analysis of the Alarmed segment in the U.S. highlights that only around a third (34%) of Alarmed people are actually taking action (Active Alarmed), whereas another 46% are willing but with a lower amount of commitment to action (Willing Alarmed), and 20% are either not taking actions or the least likely when it comes to action intentions (Inactive Alarmed) [32]. Thus, about 11% of U.S. the adult population are Alarmed and are not yet participating in collective action (the Willing Alarmed), but they are potentially open to do so and could be activated through museum programming and other communication. While we did not measure actual behavior, our results suggest attending a climate change museum could affect those intentions through increased feelings of hope and perceived social norms, both of which can lead to downstream pro-climate behaviors [5,48,49].
Museums can help strengthen perceptions of supportive social norms
Talking about climate change – particularly with those closest to us – is arguably one of the more important personal behaviors, yet its prevalence is low in the U.S. and even globally [4,36,50,51]. Past research has suggested that social norms can play a major role in either facilitating or inhibiting conversation, especially when one perceives – often incorrectly – that others do not share their opinion [50,52]. We found that visitors had much higher scores in the follow-up survey when asked to indicate their agreement or disagreement with the statement “many people in my country are concerned about climate change” (Cohen’s d=0.65). This could indicate that by visiting the museum, a process of updating a previously held social norm – about how many Americans are concerned about climate change – may have taken place. Our interview data further supports this claim as noting that ‘other people care’ was one of the most frequent takeaways and sharing points for visitors. Visitors frequently referenced the action-sticker board which was an exhibit showing the actions other visitors were committing to take. Although we cannot definitively attribute this effect to the museum alone, this preliminary evidence suggests tackling false social norms in the museum environment could be a fruitful strategy for future museum or science center exhibitions. This is especially important given that social norms are notable precursors to taking action like having climate change conversations [53]. Moreover, perceptions of social norms can affect other influential behaviors like participating in climate advocacy by, for example, contacting elected officials to encourage them to take action on climate change [48]. This is particularly important given the rarity of advocacy behaviors like this are low among people in the U.S. [33]. Reflecting on the exhibits within the museum, it could be that learning about climate change, particularly the novel dimensions of climate justice or the history of fossil fuel company deception – two themes which visitors mentioned were generally new and interesting to them – in a safe environment led to the reported increase in determinedness and confidence in talking about climate change.
Museums can help increase feelings of hope
Our data indicated that feelings of hope were higher after visiting the museum. Hope is a complex construct that can be both cognitive and affective [54]. Some studies indicate that feelings of hope can be influenced by many types of information such as climate impacts and solutions information – both of which were part of the museum’s exhibits [55]. Hence, we will not speculate as to which exhibit or exhibits helped to specifically lead to this increase in hope. However, triangulation with our interview data suggests one exhibit that may have boosted feelings of hope was the action-sticker wall that highlighted that others care about climate change and are determined to do something about it. Some interview participants reflected on how they felt encouraged by the fact that they were not alone in taking action to address climate change. However, as Ojala [54] argues, hope could be more a reflection of confidence in oneself to effect change, or their efficacy beliefs. Hence, exhibits like the action-sticker wall – tapping into the social normative dimension that more people are taking action – may be a contributor to increased feelings of hope through efficacy beliefs, although this would need to be tested in future research [56,57].
Our study has important limitations. First, the sample is likely not representative of the museum visitor population despite our efforts to collect as unbiased a sample as possible. Furthermore, our results cannot speak to visitors under the age of 18, which is likely an important demographic of visitors worthy of future research. Second, our data are quasi-experimental in the sense that the museum was like an intervention, and we measured responses pre and post. However, there could be confounding factors which enter the equation due to the fact this was not a controlled laboratory environment. We suggest future studies could ask additional questions or cross-check survey responses against media or global events to see whether there are any major factors that could have influenced the results. This is a relevant path of investigation given that our data collection occurred over about seven months. In short, we do not claim these results to be completely causal – noting the limitations of field experiments compared to controlled laboratory environments – however, we believe future research could build on our preliminary evidence through more controlled experiments. Moreover, future investigations could include other relevant variables pertaining to demographics and other climate change attitudes or beliefs or dimensions like trust towards institutions. Another relevant limitation is our lack of behavioral measures; this presents an opportunity for future research to investigate the potential effects on actual behavioral change. The interviews we conducted, while useful in our case, were brief; future research would benefit from more in-depth qualitative investigation. Finally, we acknowledge that the self-selection dynamics involved in which visitors agreed to take our surveys may have led to some social desirability bias. While we cannot rule this out, our results do corroborate some previous findings [22], suggesting the effects we found may not simply be the result of this bias.
Practical significance
As a final point, we wish to take a step back and reflect on the value of the investigation we present in this paper and the potential practical significance for communication practitioners in museums. To conduct this study required fostering a researcher-practitioner collaboration and we consider this an example of effective co-creation, something that past research has not only called for, but also identified as a challenging goal to facilitate in the museum context [24,58,59]. Fundamentally, researcher-practitioner partnerships are critically important to ensuring our focus on solving problems with communication is directed and informed by practice. As a result of this partnership, we have been able to provide a fairly detailed, yet still preliminary, look into what kinds of effects the first U.S. museum dedicated to climate change may have on its visitors. While we did not directly measure behaviors, it is clear that visiting the Climate Museum affected key variables consequential to building agency in visitors. We also acknowledge that while research aims to answer questions, more often than not it leads to unearthing new questions worthy of investigation. Future investigations can begin to focus on new questions such as: to what extent do behavioral intentions translate into actions after visiting a climate change museum? We also encourage other researchers to use our survey tool as more research and validation of each item would contribute greatly in yielding a tailored survey that other museums could use for their own purposes.
Finally, we contribute here a survey instrument that we feel could be used by any museum wishing to also understand how its climate programming is engaging visitors. We have presented the full survey instrument (and qualitative interview guide) with response scales in the supplementary materials (S1 Text) so that any organization can use it to conduct their own investigation. However, our tool is flexible in that future researchers or practitioners can choose which questions would best suit their needs. For example, our results suggested a number of visitors were already aware of the concept of climate justice and this knowledge could be drawn on to tailor a future investigation. While there are other resources like the toolkit from Mileham et al. [60] that are well-developed to assess broad social impact in museums, our survey could be a useful complement, designed specifically for deployment in climate-focused settings where the aims and outcomes are centered around climate-relevant psychological constructs.
Supporting information
S1 Data. Quantitative dataset accompanying this study.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000518.s001
(DATA)
S1 Fig. Conceptual diagram of the themes identified from analysis of interview data. Rectangles represents key actions, and themes are encapsulated in circles. Solid lines indicate a thematic connection with darker lines highlighting a cross-cutting connection. The arrows indicate a nested sub-theme.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000518.s002
(FIG)
S1 Table. Summary of % differences in demographic variables between the baseline and follow-up samples.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000518.s003
(TABLE)
S2 Table. Additional themes present in data.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000518.s005
(TABLE)
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