Effects of consensus messages and political ideology on climate change attitudes: inconsistent findings and the effect of a pretest

Sedona Chinn () and P. Sol Hart ()
Additional contact information
Sedona Chinn: University of Wisconsin-Madison
P. Sol Hart: University of Michigan

Climatic Change, 2021, vol. 167, issue 3, No 21, 21 pages

Abstract: Abstract There are inconsistent findings concerning the efficacy of consensus messages to persuade individuals to hold scientifically supported positions on climate change. In this experiment, we tested the impact of consensus messages on skeptics’ climate beliefs and attitudes and investigated how the decision to pretest initial climate beliefs and attitudes prior to consensus message exposure may influence results. We found that although consensus messages led individuals to report higher scientific agreement estimates, total effects on key variables were likely an artifact of study design; consensus messages only affected climate attitudes and beliefs when they were measured both before and after message exposure. In the absence of a pretest, we did not observe significant total effects of consensus messages on climate outcomes. These results highlight the limitations of consensus messaging strategies at reducing political polarization and the importance of experimental designs that mimic real-world contexts.

Keywords: Scientific consensus; Political polarization; Pretest; Motivated reasoning; Science communication (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10584-021-03200-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:climat:v:167:y:2021:i:3:d:10.1007_s10584-021-03200-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10584

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-021-03200-2

Access Statistics for this article

Climatic Change is currently edited by M. Oppenheimer and G. Yohe

More articles in Climatic Change from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().