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The public acknowledges the importance of water quality, and threats to water quality can provoke strong emotional responses. Despite this, the public often resists policies protecting water quality. Research with 349 US residents demonstrated that (1) emotions about specific water policies were more predictive of policy support than emotions about water quality and (2) hope about water policies was a particularly strong predictor of water policy support. In both between-person and within-person analyses, water-policy hope was a stronger predictor of water-policy support than water-policy anxiety, anger, and neutral affect–although these other emotions were related to water-policy support. These findings among water-policy emotions replicated results from a Pilot study with 148 US undergraduate students. The main study also demonstrated that water-policy support increased when policy descriptions explained how policies would improve water quality via hydro systems, and it did so by increasing feelings of water-policy hope. This research suggests that a full range of affective reactions to water policy and water quality should be considered when motivating support for policies protecting water quality. 

We evaluated whether teaching the public about the “critical zone”–the Earth’s outer skin, critical to all life— via a digital serious game can affect adults’ systems thinking about the environment and support policies to protect the environment. An experiment (N = 152) compared the effects of playing “CZ Investigator” versus viewing a static website on systems thinking about the Food-Energy-Water (FEW) nexus and support for relevant public policies. The serious game had the strongest effects on our outcomes of interest for those participants with less past science education. For these individuals, the serious game, relative to the static website, increased perceptions of the strength of interconnections across food, energy, and water systems ( p < .01) and support for policies that regulated human impacts on the environment ( p < .01). Mediation analysis revealed that increases in systems thinking explain increases in policy support. This group of users also indicated that the game was easier, more enjoyable, and more effective for learning than the website. Mediation analyses also revealed that perceived learning effectiveness was a stronger mediator than ease and enjoyment effects of the game on systems thinking and policy support. These results are valuable for environmental education because understanding interconnections within complex systems is vital for solving environmental problems, particularly for learners with less background in science.