Does a “Taylor Swift Effect” encourage pro-social behavior? Celebrity endorsement and individual willingness to purchase carbon offsets

IF 4.5 3区管理学 Q1 PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

Policy Sciences Pub Date : 2026-05-05 DOI:10.1007/s11077-026-09615-x

Jana Foxe, Nives Dolšak, Aseem Prakash

{"title":"Does a “Taylor Swift Effect” encourage pro-social behavior? Celebrity endorsement and individual willingness to purchase carbon offsets","authors":"Jana Foxe, Nives Dolšak, Aseem Prakash","doi":"10.1007/s11077-026-09615-x","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Does celebrity endorsement encourage individuals to incur private costs to provide public goods? We examine this issue in the context of climate policy, specifically aviation emissions. We ask: Does the information that a celebrity purchases carbon credits to offset their air travel emissions encourage individuals to do the same? We focus on endorsement from Taylor Swift, one of the most famous pop stars. To differentiate a “Swift Effect” from a generic celebrity effect, we examine the hypothetical purchase of offsets by two additional celebrities who share similar demographic characteristics (White women), Caitlin Clark and Angelina Jolie. We work with a pre-registered vignette-based online survey experiment (N = 1309; N = 609 attentive respondents) conducted on a representative panel of U.S. respondents. We find that, compared to the reference group (no celebrity endorsement), endorsement of any of the three celebrities does not change respondents’ willingness to purchase carbon offsets. Overall, respondents inclined toward environmental action (e.g., concerned about climate change, not frequently flying for work/leisure), and non-White respondents, were more willing to pledge to purchase offsets. Blue-collar respondents were less willing, whereas other socio-demographic attributes, such as gender, did not have a significant effect on this willingness to purchase offsets.","PeriodicalId":51433,"journal":{"name":"Policy Sciences","volume":"20 1","pages":"439-462"},"PeriodicalIF":4.5000,"publicationDate":"2026-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Policy Sciences","FirstCategoryId":"91","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-026-09615-x","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION","Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Abstract

Does celebrity endorsement encourage individuals to incur private costs to provide public goods? We examine this issue in the context of climate policy, specifically aviation emissions. We ask: Does the information that a celebrity purchases carbon credits to offset their air travel emissions encourage individuals to do the same? We focus on endorsement from Taylor Swift, one of the most famous pop stars. To differentiate a “Swift Effect” from a generic celebrity effect, we examine the hypothetical purchase of offsets by two additional celebrities who share similar demographic characteristics (White women), Caitlin Clark and Angelina Jolie. We work with a pre-registered vignette-based online survey experiment (N = 1309; N = 609 attentive respondents) conducted on a representative panel of U.S. respondents. We find that, compared to the reference group (no celebrity endorsement), endorsement of any of the three celebrities does not change respondents’ willingness to purchase carbon offsets. Overall, respondents inclined toward environmental action (e.g., concerned about climate change, not frequently flying for work/leisure), and non-White respondents, were more willing to pledge to purchase offsets. Blue-collar respondents were less willing, whereas other socio-demographic attributes, such as gender, did not have a significant effect on this willingness to purchase offsets.

查看原文本刊更多论文

“泰勒·斯威夫特效应”会鼓励亲社会行为吗？名人代言和个人购买碳补偿的意愿

名人代言是否鼓励个人承担私人成本来提供公共产品？我们在气候政策的背景下研究这个问题，特别是航空排放。我们的问题是：名人购买碳信用额度以抵消其航空旅行排放的信息是否会鼓励个人也这样做？我们专注于最著名的流行歌星之一泰勒·斯威夫特的代言。为了区分“斯威夫特效应”和普通名人效应，我们研究了另外两个名人（白人女性）购买抵消的假设，她们具有相似的人口特征，凯特琳·克拉克和安吉丽娜·朱莉。我们使用预先注册的基于小视频的在线调查实验（N = 1309; N = 609专心的受访者），在美国受访者的代表性小组中进行。我们发现，与参考组（无名人代言）相比，三位名人的代言都没有改变受访者购买碳补偿的意愿。总体而言，倾向于环境行动的受访者（例如，关注气候变化，不经常乘坐飞机工作/休闲）和非白人受访者更愿意承诺购买抵消。蓝领受访者不太愿意，而其他社会人口统计属性，如性别，对这种购买补偿的意愿没有显著影响。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

求助全文

约1分钟内获得全文求助全文

来源期刊

Policy Sciences Multiple-

CiteScore

9.70

自引率

9.40%

发文量

期刊介绍： The policy sciences are distinctive within the policy movement in that they embrace the scholarly traditions innovated and elaborated by Harold D. Lasswell and Myres S. McDougal. Within these pages we provide space for approaches that are problem-oriented, contextual, and multi-method in orientation. There are many other journals in which authors can take top-down, deductive, and large-sample approach or adopt a primarily theoretical focus. Policy Sciences encourages systematic and empirical investigations in which problems are clearly identified from a practical and theoretical perspective, are well situated in the extant literature, and are investigated utilizing methodologies compatible with contextual, as opposed to reductionist, understandings. We tend not to publish pieces that are solely theoretical, but favor works in which the applied policy lessons are clearly articulated. Policy Sciences favors, but does not publish exclusively, works that either explicitly or implicitly utilize the policy sciences framework. The policy sciences can be applied to articles with greater or lesser intensity to accommodate the focus of an author’s work. At the minimum, this means taking a problem oriented, multi-method or contextual approach. At the fullest expression, it may mean leveraging central theory or explicitly applying aspects of the framework, which is comprised of three principal dimensions: (1) social process, which is mapped in terms of participants, perspectives, situations, base values, strategies, outcomes and effects, with values (power, wealth, enlightenment, skill, rectitude, respect, well-being, and affection) being the key elements in understanding participants’ behaviors and interactions; (2) decision process, which is mapped in terms of seven functions—intelligence, promotion, prescription, invocation, application, termination, and appraisal; and (3) problem orientation, which comprises the intellectual tasks of clarifying goals, describing trends, analyzing conditions, projecting developments, and inventing, evaluating, and selecting alternatives. There is a more extensive core literature that also applies and can be visited at the policy sciences website: http://www.policysciences.org/classicworks.cfm. In addition to articles that explicitly utilize the policy sciences framework, Policy Sciences has a long tradition of publishing papers that draw on various aspects of that framework and its central theory as well as high quality conceptual pieces that address key challenges, opportunities, or approaches in ways congruent with the perspective that this journal strives to maintain and extend.Officially cited as: Policy Sci