Does a “taylor Swift Effect” Encourage Pro-Social Behavior? Celebrity Endorsement and Individual Willingness to Purchase Carbon Offsets

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.