Leveraging the power of internet memes for emotional contagion as effective strategy for environmental communication / Использование возможностей интернет-мемов для эмоционального заражения в качестве эффективной стратегии экологической коммуникации

Introduction

Environmental challenges are a growing concern for the planet that have serious consequences for human health and the environment ^[1]. Large challenges like these will need the assistance of millions of individuals, as well as different expertise. As a result, environmental rehabilitation is rapidly becoming a communication and rhetorical challenge as much as a technical one. It is important to raise awareness of these issues and to find solutions to reduce their negative impact.

From the perspective of social psychology, environmental problems are more behavioral and cultural than the result of technological development and the industrialization of societies ^{[2, p. 201]}. Certainly, these advancements have played a role in the destruction of the environment, but the individuals' beliefs and values, cultural norms, and social institutions that guide these activities are more significant. Millions of decisions made at the individual, organizational, and national levels by customers, engineers, managers, and others are the root cause of land degradation. Some argue that environmental issues stem from a conflict between personal and communal interests, a concept known as «public tragedy». However, this is not the entire picture because, in many circumstances, individual and community interests are intertwined. Most individuals appear to be concerned about their environmental effects and usually think that the land should be handed down as well as they have inherited it to future generations. Nevertheless, their individual and collective behavior contradicts this belief. Despite widespread concerns about the environment, human behavior remains destructive. That is, regardless of knowing and believing what they «should» do, individuals ultimately make decisions based on what they «want», which may harm the environment. Thus, there seems to be a gap between what they «want» to do and what they think they «should» do. While they know exactly what to do, when they have to make a decision, they show behavior that may be contrary to their values ^[3].

Several studies have suggested possible solutions to the conflict between individual desires and environmental actions. Appealing to anticipated emotions, increasing self-control, considering the role of emotions, promoting pro-environmental attitudes, providing information, and creating a positive environment are some of the answers ^{[4, p.83],[5]}. As stated by Turunen and Halme, at least two major approach may be used to explain how sustainability information turn to decisions. The first is to provide more information and understanding about sustainability, which might elicit cognitive reactions. The second approach is to appeal to emotions, which can activate emotional components that lead to sustainable behaviors ^[6].

Corral-Verdugo noticed that emotions influence pro-environmental behavior more than intentions, while both accounted for over half of the diversity in pro-environmental behavior ^[2]. As a result, recognizing the significance of emotions in determining attitudes and behaviors toward the environment is an important aspect of responding to environmental challenges. Hence, more empirical research is needed to understand how environmental emotional messages impact attitude and behavior, as well as to identify strategies to elicit public opinion that lead to actions on environmental issues.

The media can be a powerful tool for shaping emotions and influencing behavior, as it can construct and normalize emotions, shape public opinion, create culturalization, meet educational needs, and influence how individuals perceive and express their emotions ^{[7, p.25]}. As it stands, media is an effective tool for regulating pro-environmental behavior and transmitting cultural habits and values that are compatible with the environment via affecting emotion and intentions by using words, music, color, and so on ^{[8, p.38]}. Baudrillard's attention to the new dimensions of society and power seen in media and signs is significant ^{[9, p.84]}. Social media has become an integral part of the media sphere and is now considered a form of mass communication. It has enabled users to connect with people from all over the world, creating a sense of global community. Social media has emerged as a powerful tool for shaping public opinion on a wide range of issues, from politics to social and environmental issues ^[10]. Social media influences political opinions, tastes, preferences, cultural standings, and changes in collective behavior, which of course can affect pro-environmental emotions and behavior as well ^{[11, p.3]}. Studies have shown that social media can increase conservation funding, incite policy changes, and lead to beneficial outcomes by promoting pro-conservation human behavior ^{[12, p.15],[13, p.377]}. It could additionally be deployed to promote ecological campaigns and link individuals locally and worldwide on environmental concerns ^[14]. By sharing information about campaigns and events, social media can help mobilize people to take action and participate in pro-environmental activities. Social media can also be used to build social relations around environmental issues, connecting people who share a common interest in protecting the environment ^{[15, p.140],[16]}.

On social media, internet memes have become a common practice to convey ideas and emotions ^{[17, p.751-752]}. Internet memes, a popular kind of social media posts that usually consist of humor with catchy photos and words, have the ability to become viral rapidly, which makes them an especially effective tool for spreading awareness of environmental issues ^[1]. Internet memes that have taken over social media often act as a gateway for the citizen to involve in controversial issues. They are able to condense complex issues into manageable portions, and thereby creating chances for public discussion and help public process serious environmental threats, such as climate change, by making light of the situation and providing a way to manage emotions. Internet memes play a crucial role in environmental communication by educating and shaping perspectives, fostering social interactions and empowerment, and mobilizing users for social action ^{[17, p.759],[18, p.234]}.

Considering the role and potentials of social media and internet memes as a means of informing and modifying attitudes, emotion and behaviors, and according to the key role of emotions in pro-environmental behavior, we claim that, in order to properly leverage the potential of social media to mobilize pro-environmental action, we need to pay close attention to the mechanisms underpinning emotion elicitation as well as their influence on human mental processes and behavior through these media. This includes expanding our knowledge about the mechanisms and pathways via social media by which emotions impact pro-environmental behavior. Since social media post such as memes can be a channel for emotions to influence pro-environmental attitudes and actions ^[17-19], digital emotional contagion has been proposed as one of the key social media mechanisms through which emotions impact behavior ^{[20, p.316]}. Emotional contagion as an effective and appealing communication approach and its influence on group behavior have been studied in various disciplines ^{[21, p. 2312] [22, p. 6028],[23]}. However, most of the relevant research regarding digital emotional contagion has been done outside the context of environmental communication. We argue that research in the emotional contagion sciences has made considerable progress over the last decades, which has yielded important insights into this mechanism, and that the field of environmental communication could benefit from integrating these advances to a greater extent. Though, due to the specific nature of environmental communication, particularly in social media, the emotional contagion and its impacts may differ from those elicited in other domains. Therefore, before applying these insights to the design of large-scale behavioral interventions, more topical digital emotion contagion research in the environmental communication domain is needed. In short, in this paper, we address this research gap and, via an exploratory review of previous research, demonstrate how social media campaigns and communication strategies particularly internet memes, through emotions and emotional contagion, can improve our environment.

Pro-environmental behavior and emotion

There are several terms in the literature that are equivalent to pro-environmental behavior, such as «pro-ecological behaviors », «environmentally friendly behavior », «green behavior », and «sustainable behavior », all of which have shared characteristics in numerous aspects and there doesn't appear to be an explicit dispute or argument amongst researchers over its meaning. The prior and commonly employed definition refers to behavior that minimizes the detrimental influence of individual actions on the environment and later expanded to limit environmental harm and even benefit it. Further, considering the standpoint of sustainability, the definition updated to activity that promotes the environment's sustainability by preserving and protecting it ^[24]. Various approaches have been employed to classify pro-environmental behaviors, such as private and public-sphere pro-environmental behaviors, low and high effort pro-environmental behaviors, on-site and off-site pro-environmental behaviors, and place-specific and general pro-environmental behaviors ^{[24, 25]}. Kollmuss and Agyeman introduced a classification for pro-environmental behavior. They identified two types of pro-environmental behavior: direct (recycling, driving less, purchasing organic food) and indirect (money donations, political activity, and educational outreach) ^{[26, p.240]}.

Environmental behavior is affected by a wide range of factors. External and internal elements, notably demographic and psychological factors, have important influences on pro-environmental behavior. Researchers have presented several categories of factors affecting environmental behavior. Stern proposes four types of causal variables affecting environmental behavior: attitudinal factors, including norms, beliefs and values: these factors provide a general background for pro-environmental intention, which in turn can influence all environmental behaviors of a person. Contextual factors, including interpersonal influences, community expectations, advertising, government laws, other legal and institutional factors, costs and temporary incentives, physical difficulty of some behaviors, capabilities and limitations provided by technology and the artificial environment, the amount access to facilities required for behavior, and various characteristics of the broad social, economic and political context. Personal capabilities including knowledge and skills: having enough time to perform behavior, general capabilities and resources such as literacy, money and power and social position, demographic variables such as age, education, race and income can be good indicators for these personal capabilities. Habit and behavior: habit to the standard performance method is a key factor affecting meaningful and organized environmental behavior ^{[26, 27]}.

Environmental sociologists and psychologists continuously propose models to explain environmentally responsible behaviors that consider various factors to explain these behaviors; paying attention to emotions and its connection with environmental values is a new issue that has been addressed in some researches ^[28]. While Ajzen's planned behavior theory (PBT) and the theory of norm activation as the most dominant theories about pro-environmental behavior, propose that attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control are the main determinants of behavior ^[29], Duran et al. Argue that emotional aspects should also be included in the theory. They found that anger was a more important predictor of low usage of vehicle than perceived behavioral control. This suggests that emotional aspects should be considered in addition to the constructs of PBT ^[30]. Corral-verdugo noticed that emotions influence pro-environmental behavior more than intentions, while both accounted for over half of the diversity in pro-environmental behavior ^[2].

In short, several studies investigations have emphasized the significance of emotions in pro-environmental behavior ^{[2,4,5,30-36]}. Guilt, empathy, and anger are some of the emotions that have been found to be positively associated with pro-environmental behavior ^[5],[33-35]. Group emotions and moral beliefs can also influence pro-environmental behavior by creating a shared identity and sense of responsibility among individuals ^[36]. However, rather than seeing emotions as simple behavioral levers that directly influence behavior, it is necessary to understand the underlying mechanisms in order to leverage emotions via pro-environmental communications to achieve the intended pro-environmental actions.

Emotion, Emotional Contagion and Digital emotional contagion:

Emotions are grounded on values and concerns ^{[37, p.76]}. Behaviors rooted in emotion and feeling. Emotion may have considered as a form of language that's extensively spoken and understood. An emotion is an internal and physical state associated with a wide variety of internal or external sense and actions ^{[38, p.76]}. An emotion is a physical stimulation with cognitive extent that depend on a particular terrain. As a process in which understanding a series of stimulants allows a cognitive assessment to name and identify a particular state of feeling which lead to emotional, physical and behavioral responses. Emotions are powerful, transitory reactions to certain stimuli in one's surrounding. As a result, in order to experience emotion, something in the environment, such as a natural catastrophe, must have occurred or altered ^[38]. Emotions, according to scholars, comprise six domains: subjective experience, physiological, neurological, expressiveness, cognition, and motivation, which all alter depending on the emotion ^[38]. All of this can explain why one of the most significant indications of emotions is their contagiousness, which leads to the transfer of similar feelings and demeanors, a phenomenon known as emotional contagion ^{[20, 22, 39, 40, 41]}.

In fact, this phenomenon explains that exposition to the other people’s emotion could lead to emotional propagation and affects people by the same emotion ^[39]. Some researchers have likened emotional contagion to contagious of diseases that spread in social networks over a period ^[42]. One of the important factor in emotional contagion study is that emotional contagion most frequently occurs at a significantly lower consciousness, grounded on automatic processes and physiological responses. In other words, according to what Hatfield has defined« emotional contagion is a process in which through the conscious or unconscious induction of emotion and behavioral, a person or group influences the feelings or demeanors of another person or group» ^[43]. Hatfield argue, the degree to which emotional contagion occurs is intermediated by attentional processes, with lesser contagion being when further attention is allocated ^[43]. another important factor mentioned in emotional contagion study is that, there's strong substantiation to anticipate the degree of emotional contagion by two dimensions of emotion, that are, emotional valence (pleasure-displeasure) and emotional arousal (high-low activation/calming-arousing) ^[20]. There are emotional factors such as intensity, arousal, and pleasure can influence ad sharing intention ^[44].

In other words, people not only observe others emotions, but those emotions also affect their own emotional expressions and emotional state. Thus, emotional contagion is a type of social influence that can occur between two persons but also in larger groups and social networks. Because emotions impact how people think and behave, emotional contagion has effects that go beyond how individuals feel ^[45]. Purpose of research on emotional contagion is to explain how emotions are disseminated among people in social interactions and how catching another person’s emotions affects the dynamics of the social interaction.

Studies show that emotion on online media such as social media, like in the offline world, can spread from one person to another, which is known as digital emotional contagion ^[46,20]. Thus, social media platforms contribute to transmit of emotion online and posterior emotional contagion. This digital emotion contagion occurs when a perceiver’s feelings come more similar to an expresser’s feelings over time due to the influence of expresser’s feelings ^[45]. It should be noted that digital emotion contagion should be understood as intermediated emotion contagion, where the digital media companies serve as its intercessors that lead individualities to be exposed to further intense feelings at an advanced frequency ^[20]. This additionally pertains to the revenue models of digital media corporations and how their social media systems are structured. For instance, it's legitimate for digital businesses to encourage greater vocalization of emotions since doing so keeps users on the platforms longer, providing more opportunities to display promotions and information collection ^[20]. A key factor in the explanation of why content charged by emotion spreads quickly on social media is the process by which that emotion attracts attention ^[47]. It has suggested that ruling of the emotional intensity is vital in the technology emotional system, whereas in the conventional system, emotional traits dominate over all other factors ^[48].

Social media can facilitate emotional contagion by allowing individuals to share emotional content, such as internet memes, with a large audience. With the rise of user-generated content on social media expressing emotion becoming more intense and on a much wider level, and due to the contagiousness of emotions, faster and on a broader scale of emotional contagion also occurs.

Theoretical Perspectives

As articulated by Habermas, environmental policy, are motivated by both interests and values. Fear of environmental devastation and the decline in the level of well-being are examples of interests. Ideals and moral claims might include a better future for new generations. Furthermore, reciprocal linkages between interests and ideals, culture, and social structure are significant in determining the trajectory of environmental policy ^{[28, p.112]}. As a matter of fact, interests and values have the ability to ideologically impact and change moral claims; yet, the advancement of knowledge and ethical concerns might result in a clear redefining of interests and values. This is also true for environmental concerns ^[49]. From the standpoint of modern social theory, environmental degradation is seen as a critical issue. How humans value, utilize, and think about the environment is becoming a more prominent and significant component of modern social theory. Therefore, in the modern social theory, environmental conservation is only viable if we understand how and why the environment is destruct. To put it another words, in order to intervene and avoid environmental catastrophe, one must understand the conditions under which environmental regulations have been effectively deployed, as well as the constraints and restrictions that have been imposed. One of the conditions that every environmental policy must meet is the presentation of appealing and realistic social and economic alternatives ^[49].

The media has the ability to influence the people. In other words, through delivering news, the news media influences what the public thinks about. Lippmann (1965) stated that mass media shapes «the images in our minds» ^[50]. The media, by their persuasive power, are capable of developing and cementing the ideological system in society to the point that the communication elites may be called the producers of the dominant ideology. Indeed, through conceptualizing and comprehending the dynamics of culture, as well as its interaction with environment and society, the media contribute to the construction of social perceptions and the cognitive process of information. In this regard, conceptualization and role-play through the media involves advancing the society's common values and thoughts, as well as the religious and ideological foundations in the society's belief system, which take place through the processes of construction and production (as a cultural-media action), transfer and distribution (via education), and receiving and consumption of knowledge and thought ^[51]. As an educational tool along with a special educational method, the media can enhance public knowledge, awareness, empowerment, and information literacy, while conserving the core of culture, promote its sub-layers and build an information society by outlining the skills and capacities required for c