2026-10-07T22:08:04Z https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai

oai:figshare.com:article/33740596 2026-09-14T13:47:02Z category_29251 item_type_3 month_year_09_2026

Datasets for the study "Beyond the barrier of the eco-warrior: how schema-incongruent Instagram portrayals shift young adults' green people schema and group identity" Roseline van Gogh (23259806) Environmental communication Schema theory Sustainable behavior Green identities people perceptions Social media (online) <p dir="ltr">This is the dataset underlying the results of the study "<b>Beyond the barrier of the eco-warrior: how schema-incongruent Instagram portrayals shift young adults' green people schema and group identity"</b></p><p dir="ltr">Abstract: Media portrayals of eco-friendly people often display highly devoted eco-warriors. Although such portrayals may appeal to niche audiences, they make eco-friendly people appear distant and unrelatable to many others. Among young adults, highly devoted eco-warriors are admired for their dedication, yet frequently associated with negative traits, such as being pushy or judgmental. As these negative traits have become part of young adults’ existing cognitive schema of eco-friendly people (i.e., green people schema), they hesitate to identify with this group. Drawing on schema theory, this study investigates if media portrayals of eco-friendly people that challenge this narrow schema (i.e., schema-incongruent portrayals) improve young adults’ green people schema, and in turn, their eco-friendly group identity. In an online scenario-based experiment (<i>N</i>=174) using a one-factor mixed factorial design, participants saw Instagram portrayals of eco-friendly people that either confirmed or challenged the existing schema of highly devoted eco-warriors, representing the schema-congruent and schema-incongruent condition respectively. Results show that young adults’ green people schema only improved from pre-exposure to post-exposure in the schema-incongruent condition. More specifically, young adults attributed fewer negative traits to eco-friendly people after seeing schema-incongruent (vs. schema-congruent) Instagram portrayals. This, in turn, related to stronger group identification. When young adults’ environmental self-identity was taken into account, the indirect effect of schema-incongruent portrayals on group identification through the green people schema was no longer significant, hinting that the effectiveness of schema-incongruent portrayals may depend on how eco-friendly individuals perceive themselves.</p> 2026-09-14T13:47:02Z Dataset Dataset 10.6084/m9.figshare.33740596.v1 https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/Datasets_for_the_study_Beyond_the_barrier_of_the_eco-warrior_how_schema-incongruent_Instagram_portrayals_shift_young_adults_green_people_schema_and_group_identity_/33740596 CC BY 4.0