🎧 Listen to the podcast interview with Dr Tiwathia here

We interviewed with behavioral scientist Dr. Anirudh Tiwathia, Director of Behavioral Science at Rare, to discuss his recent research about how popular film and television affect on-the-ground climate attitudes and behavior.

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What They Tested

Don’t Look Up to determine its impact on viewers

Madam Secretary to determine how an episode about an extreme weather event impacted perspectives on climate

And Just Like That to learn more about the impact of small climate-friendly moments on screen and whether they can impact viewers’ perception of climate-friendly behaviors.

Grey’s Anatomy regarding extreme heat (this is ongoing).

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Don’t Look Up - Did it Work?

The team at designed and analyzed a rigorous randomized controlled trial (RCT) to assess the film’s impact on climate-related beliefs and attitudes, both on its own and when paired with a video from the marketing campaign intended to amplify the climate message.

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The study focused on their respective impacts on the key psychosocial factors that behavioral science research suggests are critical for motivating climate action.

Participants from 10 countries were randomly assigned to one of three conditions to estimate the impact of the film and related marketing video.

Condition 1: Watching Don’t Look Up

Condition 2: Watching Don’t Look Up and a brief marketing video of the film’s lead actor Leonardo DiCaprio speaking about the film in relation to climate change

Condition 3: Watching 1 of 5 non-climate-focused control films

By comparing the changes in these states across the three conditions, Rare was able to estimate the impacts of the film and marketing video across the ten countries studied.

Impacts of watching the film and the marketing video include:

After watching Don't Look Up, participants in the study were:

• About 10% more likely to see climate change as a serious threat to society.
• About 9% more worried about climate change.
• 11% less willing to vote for a politician who opposes significant climate action.
• About 8% more likely to say they intended to take action on climate change themselves.
• About 5% more supportive of government action to address climate change.

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Did Miranda’s Tofu Turn People Vegan?

Even a few seconds of on-screen behavior can begin to shift social norms.

The researchers at Rare showed participants a clip from And Just Like That... in which Miranda simply orders a plant-based meal.

"I'll take the plant-based burger."

Compared with viewers who watched the same scene featuring a meat-based meal, those who saw the plant-based version were more likely to perceive eating less meat as normal, common, and something that other people are beginning to expect.

They also viewed reducing meat consumption as having greater personal and social benefits.

Importantly, these subtle changes came without making the show any less enjoyable. Viewers liked the scene and the characters just as much regardless of whether a plant-based meal was featured.

While a single, brief scene wasn't enough to increase people's immediate intentions to eat less meat, the research suggests that entertainment can play a powerful role in shaping the cultural norms that precede behavior change – they first need to feel increasingly familiar.

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Thinking More Deeply About Culture and Action

Climate communicators often dream of creating the campaign that changes the world. Tiwathia believes this is largely a myth.

Behavior, he argues, emerges from dozens of psychological variables acting together: social norms, perceived risk, identity, self-efficacy, relevance, trust, habits, and countless other influences that accumulate over time.

We need to think of systems of change like building infrastructure. Every successful behavior change is more like climbing a staircase than flipping a switch.

Rather than searching for a magical message, we should be designing sequences of experiences.

Most campaigns attempt to own the entire behavior journey—from awareness to adoption. Instead, organizations should become experts at one stage of the pathway and deliberately partner with others.

Real systems change should be built like an ecosystem of coordinated interventions.

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Movies Don't Need to Change Behavior Immediately. They Change Culture.

Entertainment doesn't necessarily have to make people act immediately to be valuable.

A television storyline might normalize electric vehicles, but doesn't necessarily send viewers rushing out to buy an EV the next morning.

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By the time someone later encounters a rebate program, a community campaign, or a conversation with a neighbor, the idea no longer feels unfamiliar. It feels normal.

"We have to reshape the air we breathe." He was describing culture.

Hollywood influences our shared assumptions about what ordinary life looks like, long before policies arrive.

These cultural signals prepare the psychological landscape.

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Why Blue Planet Didn't "Fail"

The BBC's Blue Planet inspired millions of viewers and became one of the defining environmental documentaries of its generation.

Yet direct evidence of large-scale behavior change among viewers remained limited. You might conclude the documentary "didn't work." Tiwathia sees it differently

"The series shifted public conversation, gave policymakers political cover, and helped create conditions for legislation around single-use plastics. The impact wasn't simply whether one person stopped buying plastic bags. It was whether the culture had moved enough that governments could move too."

Some interventions exist to change the environment in which future decisions are made.

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Designing the Conditions for Change

Campaigns don't necessarily need to directly change behavior. They can serve an equally powerful role by creating conditions.

Think of "conditions for change" like how healthy soil creates conditions for a flower to bloom.

A film or art project might make climate conversations easier, normalize new behaviors, or at the very least, reduce resistance.

Behavior change emerges gradually as enough psychological conditions align. Culture is like air around us. Social norms become the soil in which new behaviors grow.

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Five Lessons for Climate Leaders 🌏

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1. Design pathways, not campaigns

Build a sequence of touchpoints that gradually moves people toward action instead of expecting one message to do everything.

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2. Measure more than immediate behavior

Track shifts in social norms, public conversation, readiness, and political support—not just sign-ups or purchases.

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3. Use culture as infrastructure

Partner with storytellers, media organizations, schools, and community leaders to make sustainable behaviors feel normal before asking people to adopt them.

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4. Own one part of the journey

Focus on the stage where your organization creates the greatest value and collaborate with others to complete the pathway to action.

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5. Think like a systems designer

Lasting behavior change happens when stories, incentives, social norms, policy, and practical support reinforce one another—not when any single intervention acts alone.

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About Our Guest

Anirudh works on the design and evaluation of behavioral interventions to encourage climate action. He also focuses on the use of mass media and entertainment to influence climate-relevant beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. He holds an MBA and a PhD from the Booth School of Business; an MA in Public Policy, an MA in Social Science, and a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Chicago; and a BA in Cognitive Science and Computer Science from Vassar College.