Selective Exposure to Environmental Messages: Dual Sentiment Pathways to Information-Seeking Intentions

Environmental problems are intensifying, prompting expanded public communication efforts to raise awareness and motivate pro-environmental behavior. However, meaningful engagement with environmental messages is often selective, as people actively choose among many competing messages. In this paper, we examined how active engagement with environmental messages related to affective orientations (i.e., sentiments) towards environmental issues. Through a selective exposure paradigm, participants selected from four types of environmental messages varying in valence (positive vs. negative) and personal relevance (human vs. animal). We expected that engagement with these messages would be associated with changes in hopeful and anxious sentiments toward environmental issues. These sentiment shifts, in turn, were expected to predict the likelihood of participants seeking further environmental information. In an initial exploratory study (N = 283), participants’ selection of the different kinds of environmental messages showed no direct effect on environmental information-seeking intentions. Further analyses revealed two competing indirect paths: (a) increased seeking intentions via enhanced anxious sentiments and (b) reduced seeking intentions via diminished hopeful sentiments. These patterns were replicated in a confirmatory study (N = 1,009), demonstrating their robustness. Together, these findings suggest that the effectiveness of environmental communication is not limited to valence-congruent sentiments. Instead, the balance of emotional reactions that messages trigger shapes information-seeking behavior.