Do Words Matter? Evaluative Media Framing, Protest Actions, and Donations to Climate Action

ABSTRACT Public support is essential to effective climate policies, yet responses to climate activism may depend on how protests are covered in the news. Building on research on activist tactics, media framing, and construal level theory, we examined whether the tone of media coverage (neutral vs. negative), the radicalness of activist tactics (moderate vs. radical), and abstract versus concrete reflection on activist behavior shape costly behavioral support for climate action. Two experiments employed news‐style vignettes, a real‐effort task, and an incentivized donation paradigm to assess actual financial contributions to a climate‐related cause. Study 1 ( N = 555) validated the manipulations of activist behavior and media tone. In Study 2 ( N = 1907), participants reflected either on why activists behaved as they did or on how they behaved, before deciding whether to donate part of their earnings to a climate charity. Negative framing was associated with lower donations than neutral framing, but this small effect did not reach conventional statistical significance with preregistered covariates ( p = 0.052) or without covariates ( p = 0.090). Exploratory moderated mediation analyses indicated conditional indirect associations. Under neutral framing, radical tactics were indirectly associated with lower donations through perceived acceptability and effectiveness. For moderate activist behavior, negative framing was indirectly associated with lower donations through perceived acceptability. The framing × tactic interaction was indirectly associated with donations through acceptability. These findings indicate that media framing and activist tactics are associated with evaluations of climate activism that, in turn, are associated with costly support for climate action.