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Building on past theoretical and empirical work on legacy motives, temporal discounting and intergenerational action, we investigated whether legacy motives can be understood as composed of two related but distinct latent dimensions: “impact” motives (i.e., caring about the positive impact one has on future generations) and “reputation” motives (i.e., caring about whether one is remembered positively). Across five online studies (total N = 1,745), we found consistent support for this two-factor model of legacy motives. Although both legacy motives correlated strongly with one-another (rs ranging from .44 to .74), impact legacy motives related to greater self-reports of environmental movement activism, personal conservation behaviors, and climate change concern relative to the effects of reputation motives, which appear contingent on the perceived visibility of a pro-environmental behavior. We consider the need to understand the dual nature of legacy motives as crucial for the creation of more effective interventions to increase intergenerational concern.

In social and environmental psychology it is increasingly recognised that a multitude of everyday practices – how we eat, travel, work and enjoy ourselves – can feel as though they are ‘locked in’ to carbon intensive lifestyle and cultural formations, making it extremely difficult for individuals, groups and communities to envision what achievable or desirable alternatives. From this perspective, collective demand for a just transition to sustainable societies depends on facilitating our capacity, individually and socially, to tell different stories about our future, ones that can address difficult emotions whilst envisioning alternative possibilities. In academic research, methods are needed that can encourage participants to imagine alternative sustainable futures. Work in this area to date has largely been quantitative, involving surveys of experts and computer modelling of possible counterfactual scenarios – i.e. ‘how could the future be different if Y happened or happens instead of X?’. This presentation briefly summarises recent research utilising qualitative and creative methods to address similar questions, by facilitating and analysing people’s capacity to create novel narratives about possible future worlds. We will then consider what we can learn from wider artistic and cultural developments in designing and delivering research and interventions that can resource, facilitate and analyse people’s capacity to collectively engage in counterfactual world-making, utopian thinking, and imagining of ‘alternative futures’ in the context of our ongoing climate and ecological crises.