Using Audience Physiology to Assess Engaging Conservation Messages and Animal Taxa

Abstract

We used heart rate change as a tool to study how positive and negative wildlife conservation messaging impacts a viewer, and which types of animal images stimulate greatest reaction. We used scenes from five wildlife conservation videos available from environmental organization websites and YouTube, with positive and negative messaging. We found both very positive and very negative messaging in videos may be similarly effective in engaging viewers. A trend in greater changes in heart rate when insects, mammals, and birds appear on the screen suggests generally high human interest in these taxa, potentially due to avoidance and attraction responses. The number of scenes (N = 54) in which various taxa appear reflects bias toward mammals (65%) and birds (17%) to capture viewers’ attention. Arousal is a primary step in engaging an audience to attend to a message. Physiological research offers innovative new techniques to evaluate public responses to communications about biodiversity conservation.

Keywords:

• Communication
• environmental attitudes
• novel methods of participant observation
• wildlife attitudes and values

Acknowledgments

We thank I. Cuba, J. Tolentino, M. Franklin, R. Soodeen, J. Gonzalez and J. Hardesty for research assistance.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded in part by the National Science Foundation Award#1566481 and by research gifts from Facebook and Google.