Does changing behavioral intentions engender actual behavior change? The context of coastal ecological engineering

Environmental communication effectively influences environmental intentions, yet its ability to translate these intentions into actual behavior changes remains understudied, especially in coastal ecological engineering contexts. This study investigates this potential inconsistency by employing the intention-behavior gap concept and examining the impact of four distinct informational interventions: social pressure, negative framing, positive framing, and emotion. Based on a between-subject experiment and the data from 5258 participants, our findings revealed that information conveying social pressure, positive framing, and emotional appeals significantly increased participants' intentions in comparison to the control group. However, none of the information interventions significantly affected actual behavior in support of ecological engineering. Consequently, social pressure, positive framing, and emotion information slightly yet significantly enlarge the intention-behavior gap. Additionally, our results suggest that positive framing surpasses negative framing in eliciting supportive intentions for ecological engineering. Finally, different types of past behaviors appear to influence subsequent actions through different mechanisms.