Can rhetoric become a new renewable power?

researchsustainability
Written By Hana Humboldt

An analysis of the rhetoric used by Australian environmental non-government organisations to close the pro-environmental attitude-behaviour gap

A Master’s thesis by Hana Humboldt

Abstract

Despite wide-spread concern for the environment, very few people who believe in taking action against climate change engage in activities to do so (Bamberg & Möser, 2007). This disparity (known as the pro-environmental attitude-behaviour gap) is widely acknowledged, particularly by environmental non-government organisations who actively campaign to their audience to improve their pro-environmental behaviours. Previous research into the persuasive strategies used by these organisations has shown them to be ineffective, as they do not appeal strongly enough to readers’ emotions nor do they strengthen the will of readers to combat climate change by empowering them. In response to current scholarly knowledge on rhetorical strategies that can improve people’s pro-environmental behaviour, this research undertook a rhetorical analysis of the texts produced by Australian environmental non-government organisations to contribute an understanding of the Australian context and state of environmental rhetoric towards pro-environmental behaviour. While the findings affirmed many of the known faults of environmental rhetoric by Australian ENGOs, they also found many texts that demonstrated strength in empowerment as well as balance between appeals to both ego and eco. Recommendations for improvement to both environmental rhetorical strategies and empowerment of the target audience are made through the findings of this research.

1.0 Introduction

A survey from Pew Research Center in 2019 found that 89% of Australians believed that climate change was a threat (Fagan & Huang, 2019), following global trends of increased concern over the previous six years. But while many people around the world believe that we have a responsibility to act against climate change, there is a large disparity between their beliefs and their actual participation in activities to combat climate change (Wyss et al., 2022). This widely acknowledged phenomenon is known as the ‘pro-environmental attitude-behaviour gap’. In response to this inconsistency, many environmental non-government organisations (ENGOs) are actively campaigning to persuade the public to incorporate behaviours that benefit the environment into their lives. Yet ample research exists that suggests the current rhetorical strategies being used are not effective (Villarino & Font, 2015).

Rhetoric can be found almost anywhere, as social media dominates a significant portion of our attention and source of the information we take in. Indeed, the widely pervasive influence of persuasion is highlighted by Burk (1969) when he wrote “wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric. And wherever there is meaning, there is persuasion” (cited in Higgins, C. & Walker, R., 2012). However, of the many rhetorical devices that can be used in persuasive writing, not all are equally effective in different contexts or for different audiences. For example, among marketing campaigns aimed at consumption curtailment, research by Herziger et al. (2020) found that appeals to consumers’ ecological concerns were not consistently effective, while appeals that put “the consumer at the center of the marketing campaign instead of the biosphere” had much more potential to be effective across a broader audience.

The goal of this project is to build on previous research into the efficacy of persuasive strategies of ENGOs and analyse the current state of texts produced in the Australian context. This research will be undertaken in an effort to answer the question ‘how can Australian environmental non-government organisations effectively use rhetorical devices to persuade their audience toward pro-environmental behaviours?’. This will produce an understanding of Australian ENGO rhetorical strategies and contribute to filling this gap in scientific knowledge. This research also aims to use the results to provide an outline for Australian ENGOs as to how they can improve their persuasive texts, thereby closing the pro-environmental attitude-behaviour gap of their readers. The scope of this project will be limited to the following parameters:

  • Texts produced by ENGOs based in Australia with an Australian target audience produced in the last four years (2018-2022). These texts are all related to improving the PEB of readers

    • These are not restricted by genre and include informative web pages, e-pamphlets, feature articles and information sheets that exist in the public domain and available through online search engines

  • An analysis of the rhetorical devices and persuasiveness of the texts in accordance with established literature relating to PEB

The total number of texts selected to analyse is 14. This analysis is not designed to be an exhaustive investigation into Australian ENGOs, but the sample size allows for a thorough examination of pro-environmental persuasiveness in ENGO texts.

 

2.0 Background

This section will cover relevant previous research done into pro-environmental attitudes and behaviour, persuasive methods as well as the role of empowerment in environmental communications.

2.1 Pro-Environmental Behaviour

Pro-Environmental Behaviour (PEB) as described by Kesenheimer & Greitemeyer (2020) is a vital factor in environmental psychology that refers to acts that minimise our impact on – or even benefit – the environment. In their research, Kesenheimer & Greitemeyer noted that increased PEB was largely motivated not by the efficacy of egoistic nor ecological appeals, but by the fact that they were ‘being observed’ which, as Lange et al. (2020) notes, shapes behaviour to conform with that deemed to be socially acceptable. This interpretation of their results suggests the existence of a collective environmental conscience that affects a significant majority of the participants, and thereby perhaps other major populations of the same demographic (the well-educated and politically left-leaning middle class in this study). By taking into account the influences that affect them, PEB can be thought of as resulting from the success of environmental persuasiveness. However, Lange et al.’s research focussed on a very specific demographic, which leaves a gap in understanding about how these modes of persuasion might affect a more general audience.

2.2 The pro-environmental attitude-behaviour relationship

Pro-environmental attitudes (PEA) refer to any number of positive beliefs that a person holds towards the environment and exists on a spectrum of strength. Despite greater awareness of climate change science and an increased sense of responsibility for the environment (Moser, 2010), there is a well-documented disparity between people’s environmental beliefs (PEA) and the amount of environmental philanthropy they engage in (PEB). While there is no known cause of this negative relationship between PEA and PEB, the gap between the two is not fixed. There are a number of documented factors that can improve this, such as work by Wyss et al. (2022) which found that people with strong PEA were more likely to engage in PEB when there was a low financial opportunity cost to do so.

2.3 Marketing Myopia

Regarding research into current environmental and sustainability marketing, Villarino & Font (2015) found that the majority of sustainability marketing is myopic, meaning that the messages crafted by businesses in general do not appeal to the consumer, but rather focus on the product itself. This problem was compounded by the fact that the rhetoric of the marketing material was strongly aligned with logos appeals for sustainability by utilising facts and descriptions, rather than using pathos and affective emotive language that consumers could personally relate to.

2.4 Eco and ego

Considerable research has already been done to understand the motivation behind PEB, specifically what appeals are most effective to certain people under different conditions. The prevailing discourse has found that the way these persuasive appeals are processed by their audience is through one of two cognitive modes, which in this research will be referred to as eco and ego. Other names for these modes include “biospheric vs egoist” (Herziger et al., 2020) or even “moral vs monetary” (Bolderdijk et al., 2012), and vary based on breadth and specificity of the original research scope. The eco modality refers to the PEA and beliefs of people to which successful appeals will align with these beliefs and therefore be successful. In contrast, the ego modality refers to the self-centered motivation of individuals based on and outcomes that directly benefit themselves.

The literature often discusses these two modes of appeal reception as a binary, with Kesenheimer & Greitemeyer (2020) framing their research into persuasive climate control messages as either eco or ego. Yet in fact there are plenty of cases where rhetorical strategies can target both eco and ego at the same time, though one is usually more prevalent and/or effective than the other. Indeed, findings by Herziger et al. (2020) indicated that messages that appealed to participants’ personal benefit (ego) were considered persuasive to both participants with pro-environmental dispositions and those who were only motivated by self-benefit. This can be explained by the work of De Dominicis et al. (2017), which affirmed that, regarding pro-environmental behaviour, egoism and altruism were hierarchically structured in a model where altruism was inclusive of egoism. Egoistic people that have low levels of altruism were only likely to be persuaded by appeals that offered a benefit to themselves and the environment (a “self-enhancing situation”) whereas participants with high levels of altruism demonstrated pro-environmental behaviour in both self-enhancing and “self-transcendent situations”, or one where the appeal would benefit the environment but not necessarily themselves.

These hierarchical dynamics of ego and eco will be considered when interpreting the persuasive appeals to either/both eco and ego in the texts sampled for this research. The prediction of this research is also that strictly ego or ego-hybrid appeals will be much more frequent and persuasive than strictly eco appeals.

2.5 Power

Research by Dong et al. (2020) discovered that when people with strong PEA have a subjective sense of power, they are more likely to engage in PEB. They have also suggested that their findings could “help improve the effectiveness and efficiency of environmental communication tactics … to reduce the gap between their pro-environmental dispositions and actual actions.”  Building on their findings and suggestion, this research will be the first to conduct a rhetorical analysis of Australian ENGO texts with a focus on reader empowerment and the implications this has on the texts’ persuasiveness. Recent research also suggests that feelings of personal autonomy, rather than social influence, play a dominant role in people's desires for, and experiences of, power (Lammers et al., 2016). With this in mind, the analysis of empowerment in these texts will also make special consideration for how they encourage personal autonomy to persuade the reader to improve their PEB.

3.0 Methods

14 texts were selected from a variety of ENGOs based in Australia with Australian audiences, including the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF), the Australian Conservation Foundation, CleanUp Recycling, Climate Council, Greening Australia, Renew, the Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation, Sustainable Gardening Australia and the Australian Battery Recycling Initiative. The texts are from a range of genres, ranging from informative pamphlets to feature articles, but they are all aimed at improving the PEB of Australian consumers in one way or another. All texts are readily available to the public through their websites and online search engines such as Google, which were used to build this sample size.

The initial research design thought to use textual analysis to understand how these texts are persuading their audience towards PEB. However, textual analysis refers to the wide range of qualitative methodologies (Given, 2008) that critically look at the relationship between construction of texts and the resulting extrapolated meanings. Given the breadth of this framework, the method was reconsidered to instead use rhetorical analysis, which is a much more focused approach under the umbrella of textual analysis. As Caulfield (2022) notes, rhetorical analysis focuses not so much on the content of the author’s message, but rather their goals, the techniques they use, and the appeals they make to the audience when conveying a message. This specified approach was found to be more effective in understanding the methods of persuasion used by Australian ENGOs in their written material.

The rhetorical analysis of this research was framed by applying two questions that related to the core aspects of the research question to each text. These questions were designed to narrow the scope of the analysis to a context that was relevant to answering the research question and also to apply a degree of consistency to each text. As the research question implies an inherent existence of a cause-effect relationship between the persuasive methods of ENGO texts and the potential for changing behaviours of readers toward PEA, each question was designed to tackle one half of this relationship.

The first question was ‘what effective rhetorical devices are being used to persuade the audience?’. This question focussed on the ‘cause’ half of this relationship; the rhetorical strategies used to persuade the reader. The primary persuasive strategies that were evaluated were those referenced in the background research, such as appeals to ego and/or eco and whether the text was considered ‘myopic’ or not. Beyond this, traditional rhetorical strategies such as Aristotle’s ethos (character and credibility), logos (logic and reasoning) and pathos (emotional appeals) were also observed.

The second question was ‘does the text empower the reader/target audience to improve their PEB?’. This research also aims to build on the work of Dong et al. (2020) who found that the subjective feeling of empowerment was a strong influence on closing the gap between pro-environmental attitudes and behaviour of people with pro-environmental dispositions. As such, this question was devised to ascertain the degree to which the rhetoric in these texts empowers readers towards improving their PEB. Texts may empower readers through a number of ways, such as directly linking exemplar PEB directly to positive ecological outcomes and how these behaviours are shown to be accessible to the reader. More of this will be discussed in 4.4 of the results section.

 

4.0 Results

4.1 Voice and formality

Across the board there were very few attempts to establish any credibility (ethos) of the organisation in these texts, which hindered their persuasiveness considerably. Of those that did, authority on the relevant topics was usually established by providing prior projects or partnerships of the organisation. For example, Sustainable Gardening Australia provided a dot point list of garden centres and suppliers that “share [their] vision too” (SGA, 2022). While examples such as these were limited, the simple presentation of partnerships was effective in establishing ethos, especially early on in the text.

While ethos was further established through the use of formal voice, it should be noted that texts that used this voice were low on overall persuasiveness. Formal voice can be persuasive in certain contexts, but in this research it was found that formal writing did not offer as many modes to persuade readers in other ways (such as emotional connections) when compared to the texts that utilised a more casual voice and colloquialisms. These more informal texts were able to establish much stronger ties with the reader by paralleling their dialects and/or sociolects with slang and cliches exclusive or familiar to Australian English. A strong example was from an article by the Climate Council that used Australian slang terms such as “dollarydoo”’ and “moolah” instead of ‘money’ or ‘cash’. Mirroring these sociolinguistic idiosyncrasies contributed to a sense of being seen and understood by the reader which in turn made the rest of the content provided seem more relevant and accessible to the reader. This was one of the most effective persuasive methods used to improve the readers’ PEB.

4.2 Emotional appeals and empathy

In contrast to work by Villarino & Font (2015), Australian ENGO rhetoric is not ‘myopic’ in the sense that there were many attempts to connect emotionally to the reader and persuade through empathy. A key strategy used was to create a sense of shared experience(s) with the reader to build both credibility and an emotional connection. Given that much information about climate change is statistical, use of anecdotal or question hooks were much stronger than statistical or quotation hooks. This is due to the fact that questions and anecdotes help contextualise the information-heavy content for the average consumer. An example of an effective anecdotal hook used came from Climate Council, which reads as follows:

Here in Australia and right around the world, we’ve all been spending a lot more time at home recently due to coronavirus. Energy efficiency is more important than ever since more time at home means more household energy used… (Climate Council, 2020)

This hook immediately contextualises the article for the Australian audience, meaning that the reader is much more likely to continue reading if they are made to feel that the subject matter is relevant to them. Furthermore, the indirect reference to the struggles of COVID-19 isolation gives the impression that the author is empathetic to the reader and welcomes them through a perceived shared experience, which works to persuade the reader through both pathos as well as ethos. This was an effective strategy compared to other appeals to the readers’ emotions, such as guilt-tripping about the negative effects of poor waste management by the WWF, who called their readers and all Australians an “ecological Bigfoot” which they “shouldn’t be proud of” (WWF, 2018). Guilt-tripping tactics often risk being condescending or assuming intent of the reader to actively harm the environment, and thus are unlikely to be persuasive.

This use of empathy could also be found in statistically-driven statement hooks for new paragraphs that utilised inclusive plural personal pronouns such as ‘us’ and ‘we’. An example of an effective use of these pronouns to persuade the author with a sense of shared experiences was from Clean Up Australia (2022):

A recent report by Cleanaway found that 89% of us believe recycling is important, 74% rate ourselves as good or very good recyclers, and nearly all of us are participating in some form of sustainable behaviour in our everyday lives.

This opening to a paragraph then goes into a lay-person description of the pro-environmental attitude-behaviour gap, which ordinarily would suffer the same problem as the WWF’s guilt-tripping and thus hinder the persuasiveness of the text. However, through the use of ‘us’ and ‘we’, the author includes themselves among those doing harm through this contrarian behaviour, which alleviates the guilt felt by the reader. This makes the reader more susceptible to being persuaded by the following tips to improve their PEB, thus making this an effective empathetic strategy that can be applied to a variety of contexts.

4.3 Appeals to eco and ego

In line with earlier predictions, the texts analysed made far more appeals directly to ego than to eco. These findings reflect the current research as outlined by both Herziger et al. (2020) and De Dominicis et al. (2017) in so much as that egoistic messages are effective on both people with high and low levels of altruism, whilst biospheric messages (those appealing to benefits for the environment only) are only effective on altruistic people. The most common form of appeal was that of De Dominicis et al.’s ‘self-enhancing situations’, where pro-environmental behaviours were framed as having coincidental benefits to both the reader and the environment. For example, Renew’s ‘Renter’s Guide to Sustainable Living’ (2018) provides many household tips, such as swapping out halogen lights for LEDs, which reduce carbon emissions and energy consumption while simultaneously lowering electricity bills for consumers. This was another effective empathetic strategy that helped to contextualise the content for Australian consumers. The overwhelming majority of benefits from other texts were also financial, but interestingly the appeals were both egoist (direct benefits to the reader) but also financial in terms of industry, where Greening Australia (2020) stated that natural land preservation contributed $1 billion per annum in tourism revenue to Victoria’s state economy. Other self-enhancing situations used to persuade readers included benefits to health and safety, particularly in regards to waste management of toxic chemicals such as batteries (Australian Battery Recycling Initiative, 2022).

4.4 Empowerment

In the sample examined in this research, feelings of empowerment were often inconsistent if present at all. A great deal of the texts analysed did indeed mention the benefits of PEB but showed little to no empowerment through their use of rhetoric. Explicating the link between PEA and positive outcomes for the environment was the most effective and widely used strategy of empowerment in these texts, but with varying degrees of success and consistency. Of those that demonstrated even low levels of empowerment, many had fewer, yet strong and targeted phrases of empowerment that were framed by other methods of persuasion. An example of this came from CleanUp Australia, which dedicated a significant section to statistics surrounding Australian PEB, before providing a list of PEA that were empowered with clear outcomes that would benefit both the reader and the environment.

Another effective empowerment strategy was the use of shorter and potentially less empowering phrases but using them constantly. This strategy was used most effectively by the WWF (2018) in the figure 1, an informative graphic aimed at getting Australians to reduce their food wastage. Sections such as ‘compost’, ‘take it home’ and ‘little & often’ are short, succinct and direct. While the quality of the writing may have suffered as a result of the brevity, it is the coordinated effort that is suited to this format as a method of empowerment.

Despite the trend of weak empowerment across the sample, few texts demonstrated strong empowerment in isolated sections of their writing. The clearest example of empowerment came from Australian Battery Recycling Initiative (ABRI) in the following:

Unfortunately, cobalt contains toxic elements and is also mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where slave labour conditions exist for both adults and children. By recycling your batteries you can be sure that the cobalt is being reused and avoid supporting the slave trade. (ABRI, 2022)

This short panel from their website greatly empowers readers by directly linking improved battery recycling practices to having positive environmental, social and human rights benefits, making it a highly effective persuasive strategy. This is largely due to its use of strong, declarative tone and phrases such as “you can be sure that” that leave little room for the reader to counter, thus leaving them persuaded and empowered as to the potential of their actions for change. Two other texts solidified general feelings of empowerment by strengthening the positive outcomes of PEB through the use of persuasive statistics (Climate Council, 2020) as well as previous successes of behaviours such as citizen science (Greening Australia, 2020). In regards to personal autonomy, as discussed by Lammers et al. (2016), this was also found to be most salient in the above ABRI quote by using “your” to isolate and personally empower the reader as an individual. This was the strongest and most evident example of personal autonomy empowerment, as the rest of the sample did not make use of this strategy.

Overall, the general trend of these texts did not seem to actively include empowerment as a major feature of their pro-environmental rhetoric, as these modes of empowerment were often incidentally intertwined with other rhetorical strategies. This is a short-coming of modern Australian ENGO rhetoric and could stand to become a much more integral focus of these texts. If Australien ENGOs could incorporate empowerment more consistently to their texts, this could have lasting improvement on improving the PEB of their readers.

 

5.0 Conclusion

It is undeniable that Australia’s over-consumption is having a major impact on climate change and global warming (WWF, 2018). While it has been noted by the United Nations Development Programme (2021) and many other researchers (Pew Research Center, 2019) that the majority of people across the world hold pro-environmental attitudes, there has been a well-documented gap between what people believe should be done about the environment and their actual actions. Many ENGOs are creating persuasive texts in order to combat this issue and enact positive change against global warming, however the effectiveness of these texts in Australia is mixed among current organisations. To that end, this research was taken in an effort to answer the question ‘how can Australian environmental non-government organisations effectively use rhetorical devices to persuade their audience toward pro-environmental behaviours?’.

The findings of this research affirmed that many persuasive strategies used in the Australian context were ineffective and should be avoided. Some were still considered to have ‘myopic’ marketing strategies (Villarino & Font, 2015), meaning that the methods of persuasion were focussed on logic and statistics without regard for the audience and connecting with them emotionally. However these texts were in the minority, which can be seen as a positive on the whole for Australian ENGO rhetoric. The majority of the texts analysed included appeals to the reader’s emotions and actively employed persuasive strategies that capitalised on building empathy with the reader that proved effective in persuading them towards PEB.

Appeals to ego and De Dominicis et al.’s ‘self-enhancing situations’ were more common than pure appeals to eco, which was another strength of Australian ENGO rhetoric. Similar to the myopic texts mentioned before, texts that were reliant on using eco-oriented methods of persuasion failed to connect environmental issues directly with their audience, thus negatively affecting their persuasiveness. Future ENGOs should consider the reader/consumer first as they are the target of persuasion, rather than the state of climate change itself, as stating ecological facts often does not resonate with readers.

The presence and effectiveness of empowerment was also mixed. Seven of the texts analysed were found to empower the reader with varying degrees of success. While many of these texts had strong foundations for empowering their audience, they failed to follow through on these foundations and thus hindered the persuasiveness of the text. The most effective method of empowerment in these texts was to directly link the PEB of the audience to positive environmental outcomes. In making this link tangible to the reader through definitive phrasing and strong evidence and/or examples, it may become clear to the reader that their actions can affect change, which is a fundamental aspect of empowerment. However, many texts simply stated the PEB and then the outcomes but failed to make concrete links between the two, which was the most common issue that hindered empowerment and should be taken into consideration by ENGOs when constructing their texts.

There are many strategies that exist in the current discourse of Australian ENGOs that are effective in persuading consumers to improve their PEB, however there are more cases of ineffective strategies that should be avoided. Australian ENGOs should avoid these ineffective strategies while keeping in mind the effective ones outlined in this research in regards to using empowerment, self-enhancing situations as well as empathy to persuade their audiences.

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Hana Humboldt https://www.hanawrites.com