Taking action may be crucial in shaping how we think and feel about climate change, according to this open access research paper. By carrying out climate actions people may ‘self-persuade’ – building up a sense of confidence, or ‘agency’, to carry out further climate actions. As Kris De Meyer and colleagues write:
“our actions change our beliefs, awareness and concerns through a process of self-justification and self-persuasion. As one action leads to another, this process of self-persuasion can go hand in hand with a deepening engagement and the development of agency—knowing how to act.
Due to this persuasion-through-action effect, storytelling can play a key role, as we can pick up this confidence to act from other people too:
“One important source of agency is learning from the actions of others. We therefore propose an approach to climate communication and storytelling that builds people’s agency for climate action by providing a wide variety of stories of people taking positive action on climate change.”