Charles Rotter
Environmental Communication published a paper by Janine Blessing and Anja Kalch on October 27 asking whether climate messages work better when whispered. ASMR, for the uninitiated, is the YouTube genre where someone murmurs into a microphone and taps on things until the viewer’s scalp tingles.
From the abstract:
A 2 × 2 between-subjects online experiment (N = 159) then tested whether whispered narration and nature sounds influence contentment, momentary well-being, and behavioral intentions. Quantitative analyses revealed no significant effects. However, qualitative thought-listing data suggest that ASMR may present an innovative sensory-affective format that can foster emotional engagement and reflective consideration of climate action, pointing to new directions for positive climate communication.
https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2026.2753498
No significant effects. However.
The stimulus was a video of Bavarian water, stones, forest and grass, 70 seconds long. In two versions a male speaker from the campus radio station whispered the message. In the other two the same words appeared as on-screen text. Half the versions had the nature soundtrack and half were silent. The message itself:
It began by outlining Germany’s goal of achieving climate neutrality by 2050, followed by an explanation of Earth Overshoot Day and encouraging news on how this trajectory could be reversed. Viewers were then presented with suggestions such as reducing meat consumption and minimizing food waste, along with motivating explanations of how cycling, using public transportation, or eating less meat can contribute to sustainability efforts. The video concluded with an optimistic message: “We can do it.”
https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2026.2753498
The subjects were not exactly a random draw of German voters.
Data collection was conducted as part of a university seminar, and students enrolled in the course were asked to recruit participants from their personal networks.
https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2026.2753498
Students rounded up their friends and family, 102 of the 159 were women, and 71% had never watched an ASMR video. Nobody did a power analysis before collecting the data.
Afterwards the subjects were asked how they felt. Contentment was three German adjectives, balanced, fine and satisfied, each rated from 1 to 7. Well-being was the WHO-5 index, normally asked about the past two weeks, reworded to “after watching the ASMR video.” One of its five items became “my interest in this type of video increased/was piqued.” Behavioural intention was three versions of the same promise to eat and travel greener “next month,” and nobody checked next month.
Those are the inputs. A friend of a student, a minute and ten seconds after watching a creek, decides whether she feels a 4 or a 5 on “balanced.” Ask her again after lunch and she might say 3. A promise about next month’s bus trips costs nothing to make in a questionnaire and nothing to break. None of these numbers was actually measured, just volunteered by subject.
Then the numbers went into the machinery. The first test simply compared the four groups’ average answers. Whispering versus on-screen text made no difference to well-being or to intentions. Birdsong versus silence made no difference. Whispering and birdsong together made no difference.
Nothing moved.
The authors pressed on anyway. They tested whether feeling content was the hidden route by which the video changed people’s intentions, what statisticians call mediation. To put error bars on that route they reshuffled the same 159 sets of answers thousands of times, a technique called bootstrapping, and reported the result to four decimal places. The video’s effect on intentions by way of contentment came out at −0.0004 in one group and +0.0004 in the other, on a 7-point scale.
This is the trouble with a whole genre of climate communication research. Careful statistics can tell you how much to trust a measurement, but they cannot make the measurement any better than it was. Shuffle 159 guesses about how “balanced” someone feels ten thousand times and you have ten thousand arrangements of the same guesses. You don’t get precision out of a feeling by running it through a computer, just faux precision about a feeling with a lot of decimal places.
The paper’s reported figures don’t all hang together either. For two of its tests the p-value printed, the number that says how likely a result is to be chance, doesn’t match the statistic printed beside it. Recalculated, .817 should be about .47 and .999 should be about .92. Nothing was significant either way, but nobody caught it. The authors say they used ChatGPT-4o and Claude to “translate sentences and improve readability.”
Then there is the manipulation check. Subjects answered yes (1) or no (2) to “When watching the video, I heard nature sounds.” In the silent versions the mean was 1.73, so roughly a quarter of the people who watched a soundless video said they heard nature.
So the paper falls back on the open-ended comments. The two authors coded them for “positive remarks about nature” and “optimism and motivation toward climate action.” The second code counted “I agree with everything that was said in the video.”
Look at the bottom row of conditions. Written text, no nature sounds, no whispering, which is to say no ASMR at all, produced the most optimism of the four (36.6%) and tied for the most nature appreciation (39.0%). The ASMR-free video did as well as the full ASMR treatment.
The authors see it too.
Without a control group receiving either no video or a neutrally framed message, the contribution of ASMR as a format cannot be disentangled from the contribution of message valence. In this sense, the present findings may speak less to the specific potential of ASMR as a format and more to the broader potential of positively framed climate messages to elicit reflective engagement.
https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2026.2753498
And then, in the theoretical implications:
Although this pathway was not empirically supported, the null findings themselves carry theoretical value by identifying boundary conditions for this mechanism
https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2026.2753498
The conclusion still says “the qualitative findings indicate that ASMR videos have the potential to foster appreciation of nature and reflection on individual climate-related actions.” The prior work they lean on, Bogueva and Marinova 2020, had 13 of 20 participants find ASMR an effective way to engage with climate.
The acknowledgements thank the students of the bachelor’s seminar that ran the study. Its title was “Boring, calming or inspiring?”
Which one was it?
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Quotes and table from Blessing and Kalch 2026, https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2026.2753498, CC BY 4.0.
