Global Study Reveals Challenges in Shifting Climate Beliefs - The Energy Mix

Global Study Reveals Challenges in Shifting Climate Beliefs

Galvanizing people to demand effective climate policy is a tough sell, but people sometimes respond when prodded to think about future generations, especially our own descendants, finds a new megastudy of how behavioural interventions affect climate attitudes.

There is “no silver bullet” when it comes to changing human behaviour to advance climate action—partly because humans are so diverse—but “decreasing the psychological distance” between the self and the climate crisis is one of the things that can help move the needle, says exhaustive new research published this month in the journal Science Advances, titled “Addressing Climate Change with Behavioural Science: A Global Intervention Tournament in 63 countries.”

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Interventions and Results Compared Globally

The study builds on a growing body of research across the behavioural sciences that investigates how to boost sustainable behaviours like recycling, public transport use, and household energy savings. “Communications aimed at reducing the psychological distance of climate change, by making it feel more geographically, socially, and temporally close, were effective at increasing climate concern and amplifying self-reported intentions to engage in mitigating behaviors, such as reducing energy consumption,” the study authors write. Similarly, appeals to “work together” have been effective in boosting behaviours like charitable giving.

But no single study had yet compared the effectiveness of these interventions across populations, the authors say. So, they designed a “global megastudy,” with nearly 250 research laboratories around the world conducting identical research into the impacts of various interventions on climate attitudes and behaviours. The labs submitted their findings for aggregation into an international dataset.

The 59,440 participants from 63 countries were predominantly from the Global North, but also included people in Global South nations like Sudan, Gambia, and Vietnam.

These participants were exposed to 11 “behavioural interventions” identified by experts as at least theoretically likely to improve four climate mitigation “outcomes”: increased belief that climate change is happening, increased support for climate policy, increased willingness to share climate news on social media, and increased willingness to engage in “an effortful behavioural task”—in this case, virtual tree-planting.

Before proceeding through the study, which ran from July 2022 to May 2023, participants were asked to position themselves on a “climate belief” spectrum, from 0 to 100.

The 11 interventions included appeals to social norms like “working together” for a common goal, invocations of moral, and expert authority, including the scientific consensus about climate change, exposure to “doom and gloom” messaging to trigger “negative emotions” like fear, and empathetic role-playing through letter-writing.

This last category took two forms. The first emphasized “future self-continuity” by asking participants to “project themselves into the future and write a letter addressed to themselves in the present, describing the actions they would have wanted to take regarding climate change.”

The second emphasized how one’s current actions affect future generations, with participants asked “to write a letter to a socially close child who will read it in 25 years when they are an adult, describing current action toward ensuring a habitable planet.”

Letter Writing Shows Some Promise

“Even in participants with low levels of pre-existing climate change belief, interventions such as reducing psychological distance, future self-continuity, and effective collective action are all viable ways to increase belief in climate change,” the authors say. Among their key findings:

• Climate belief was strengthened most (2.3%, globally) by “decreasing psychological distance.”

• Those who identified as most uncertain about their climate belief appeared most susceptible to having that belief deepened.

• For individuals with “modest to high levels of initial climate belief,” writing a letter to a child in the future proved most powerful (2.6%) in stimulating support for stronger climate policies, followed by “collective action efficacy, future self-continuity, and decreasing psychological distance.”

Those last three interventions proved “relatively ineffectual” among climate deniers. On the other hand, the motive power of writing to a child in the future was felt “across nearly the entire spectrum of initial belief.”

Critically, “for those that were very low to moderate on initial belief, the ‘doom and gloom’ intervention appeared to backfire, reducing support for climate change policies.”

Of the 11 interventions, nine increased respondents’ willingness to share on social media, even at moderate levels of initial belief.”

While “the increase in willingness to share by inducing negative emotions [via doom and gloom stories] extended to individuals who generally do not believe in climate change,” the study states, exhortations to work together for the common good “backfired among those who are very low on initial belief, reducing their willingness to share information on social media by up to 12%.”

Strikingly, “no intervention increased the more effortful behavior—several interventions even reduced tree planting.”

In a recent post in Scientific American, lead author Madalina Vlasceanu and co-author Jay J. Van Bavel say“doom and gloom” messaging can be “highly effective for stimulating climate change information sharing, like posting on the Internet or social media, where negativity reigns.” But those seeking to change their own climate beliefs, or spur policy support, will want to steer clear.

For those outcomes, it’s better to write a letter to a child in the future explaining your climate actions today, or to ponder the impacts of climate change on your hometown.

That many other interventions “also failed or backfired when push came to shove… underscores how difficult it is to actually mobilize real, effortful action on climate change,” Vlasceanu and Van Bavel write. “This is why collective action—rather than a focus on individual actions—might be necessary to trigger real progress.”

In a talk for Southern Oregon Drawdown, organizational development consultant Will Grant echoes this recommendation—that climate action efforts need to come from the middle-out and focus on community- and institution-based sweet spots like schools and workplaces. The approach facilitates collaboration among individuals who share these spaces, allowing them to collectively propel climate action forward. Within these spheres, the crucial task of raising awareness through meaningful conversations with various stakeholders gains momentum.

On a country-wide level, researchers found that interventions increased climate policy support by 9% in Romania but decreased it by 5% in Canada.

Disappointed that they failed to “find any silver bullet for spurring climate action,” the research team concluded that “understanding how different messages work, and in what contexts, will be critical to changing beliefs, spreading the word, and mobilizing action.”

To aid in such understanding, the team has created an open-access climate intervention web app which allows users to “see the effects of its interventions along dimensions such as country of residence, income level, age, ideological leaning, socioeconomic status, gender and also type of climate action targeted.”

You’ve Got to Be Joking

While Vlasceanu’s team envisions strategies to enhance climate belief and promote sustainable behavior, some scientists say the core issue is climate change’s messaging problem. “Many people find the topic of global warming tiresome or depressing because of the apocalyptic stakes at play,” writes the New York Times, noting that there is a growing movement to “take on the climate crisis with humour.”

When it comes to communicating climate science, “academics are trained to write in their own language, sending you to the dictionary every three words,” said Sarah Finnie, the founder of the 51 Percent Project, an initiative at Boston University that aims to help people communicate better about climate change. “Humour is a really great way to kind of calm the Doomerism and the panics that can paralyze people.”