Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges of our time, demanding urgent and effective action to mitigate its severe impacts. One barrier to effective climate change action is its polarizing nature largely driven by the media, as people prefer to consume news that aligns with their political beliefs. This tendency is especially strong among climate skeptics, who are more inclined to seek information that reinforces their views on climate change. In this context, communication—especially on social media—plays a crucial role in bridging cross-partisan boundaries. However, meaningful dialogue may be hampered if individuals do not believe these interactions will be effective.
To address this challenge, Computational Social Science Lab (CSSLab) Post-Doctoral Researcher Amir Tohidi, and coauthors Stefano Balietti, Samuel Fraiberger, and Anca Balietti in their new paper, Divergence Between Predicted and Actual Perception of Climate Information, explore the relationship between expected and actual persuasiveness of climate change news articles.
The authors first did a survey in which they collected participants’ predictions about the persuasiveness of a set of climate change related articles, and then compared those predictions with the actual effects measured through a randomized experiment. The results showed a gap between predictions and actual effects: climate change articles in practice significantly increased concern about climate change among skeptics, while most people, especially climate advocates, expected them to be ineffective.
Figure 1: Methods outlined visually, as drawn from the paper.
Researchers carried out a survey-based experiment to determine the relationship between expected and actual persuasiveness of information about climate change on climate skeptics. 798 Participants with different stances on climate change- advocates, moderates, and skeptics- were asked to read a number of climate related articles and assess how hypothetical readers (either supportive, indifferent, or opposing climate change actions) might change their attitudes after reading climate change news articles.
The results revealed a significant level of pessimism regarding expected changes in attitudes. Climate skeptics anticipated that their peers would become even more entrenched in their skepticism when exposed to articles highlighting the severity of the issue. Meanwhile, advocates and moderates generally expected that such persuasive messages would have no meaningful impact on skeptics.
The second part of the experiment tested the accuracy of these predictions. To carry this out, 1,000 climate skeptics were randomly assigned to either read a climate change article or control article (on an unrelated topic). Afterwards, the researchers assessed for changes in the participants’ climate change beliefs, support for climate action, willingness to adopt eco-friendly behaviors, and climate change-related donations.
The results indicated a noticeable disparity between perceived and actual effects among climate change skeptics. Contrary to expectations, the randomized experiment revealed that exposure to climate information significantly positively influenced skeptics’ beliefs about climate change. The observed effect size exceeded 0.2 standard deviations, a substantial and statistically significant magnitude when compared to similar persuasion experiments.
The shifts in attitudes were primarily driven by a change in beliefs about the urgency of climate change. However, this concern did not translate into a willingness to support climate policies, take personal action, or alter behaviors such as making donations. Prior research highlights this challenge, emphasizing the difficulty of changing policy support and actions. Nevertheless, there was substantial heterogeneity; weaker skeptics demonstrated significant persuasion toward supporting climate policies, indicating that skeptics exist on a spectrum and should not be lumped into a single category.
Pessimism towards skeptics “diminishes engagement efforts and undermines cooperation,” says Tohidi. The expectation that these discussions could lead to potential conflicts deters people from engaging in cross-partisan dialogue, creating a barrier to collective climate change action. Furthermore, the effectiveness of climate change communication depends on whether skeptics are more responsive to climate messages and more willing to cooperate and take action.
Addressing this challenge, Tohidi et al.’s research is the first study that assesses the relationship between one’s climate change stance and their expectations on the persuasiveness of climate change news articles, using articles that were filtered out from a database of 2.6 million English language articles from 1990 to 2020.
The paper highlights the need for bipartisan support and dialogue to drive climate action. To achieve this, it is important to address misconceptions about climate skeptics’ reality and develop strategies to promote media literacy to mitigate the impacts of echo chambers. While skeptics are more receptive to change than expected, the attitude-behavior gap observed is still a challenge, as the actions that people take that are critical to a sustainable climate change response.
Divergence Between Predicted and Actual Perception of Climate Information was published in PNAS Nexus.
AUTHORS
DELPHINE GARDINER
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Communications Specialist