Tapping Water into Your Heart: Promoting Water Conservation through its Uniqueness Compared to its Scarcity strengthened by the individualsU+2019 personal values in communicational strategies

Water is central to human activity and wellness; nevertheless, freshwater is a limited resource forecasted to be promptly scarce -worldwide- due to climate change, population growth and current consumption behaviours. Conjointly, individuals from Western European countries exhibit misperceptions relative to water, considering it as an unlimited resource, and therefore as a common good. The former counteracting the urgency to mitigate water shortage. Although different strategies have successfully stimulated water conservation, the effects do not prevail in the long-term or outside experimental context. Suggesting that the motivation to conserve water is not a central driver of the individualsU+2019 behaviours but as a consequence of extrinsic stimuli (i.e. nudges and financial incentives). The current project aims to increase the effectiveness of communicational strategies by intrinsically transforming the meaning of water, hereby enhancing the value attached to it. Thus, it is considered that transforming perceptions associated with water, particularly the uniqueness of water and current scarcity risks will not only reduce possible backfiring effects of scarcity appeals but will also increase intrinsic motivation (increasing the value of water within their personal values) to comply with communicational strategies that promote water conservation. Hence, we study and compare underlying mechanisms that could backfire or facilitate scarcity and uniqueness appeals.