Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p>Beneath escalating climate change, biodiversity loss and social inequality lies a crisis of imagination: although solutions exist, people struggle to envision a just and sustainable future. One promising response is the vision approach – empowering people to imagine alternatives to the current society. We introduce and experimentally test the Vision-to-Action (V2A) framework, specifying two pathways (normative reasoning and possibility perception) and twoconditions (perceived desirability and possibility) for societal alternatives to motivate support for change. Across three politically diverse samples (N_total = 3,264), participants envisioned an alternative society described along four dimensions: social justice, ecological sustainability, democratic participation, and solidarity. Relative to a no-intervention control, engaging with this vision increased motivational outcomes for socio-ecological change, including collective action intentions, policy support, movement identification, collective efficacy beliefs, and moral obligation. Importantly, the vision was more effective than critically reflecting on the status quo along the same dimensions. This effect was driven by stronger reappraisal of social change and by engaging individuals not only in normative reasoning (how society should be) but also in possibility perception (how society could be). Effects depended on whether participants were experimentally induced to focus on the possibility (vs. impossibility) of the envisioned society and on its perceived desirability, but were similar across political orientations. Among participants who genuinely engaged with it, the vision (vs. status quo) even had stronger effects among right-leaning than left-leaning individuals. We derive implications for mobilizing societal transformation: increasing the mental accessibility of emancipatory alternatives, leveraging their widely shared desirability, and demonstrating their possibility.</p>