Climate Change and Virtual Reality: Psychological Distance and Consumer Behaviour

This 2-year project is funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) through the Insight Development Grant program. The project investigates how Virtual Reality (VR) affects society’s psychological distance of climate change, which in turn affects its public engagement to climate change activities. Specifically, it 1) explores how perceived psychological distance of climate change affects consumers’ pro-environmental intention, 2) investigates the mediating role played by perceived personal threat between psychological distance and consumers’ pro-environmental intention, and 3) examines how VR affects the strength of the link between perceived psychological distance and perceived personal threat.