Overcoming Polarization on Climate Change
Overcoming Polarization on Climate Change
Issue 127: A new study finds that people across the political spectrum will take climate change action--we need to connect this to their broader sense of identity.
The world is scorching. 2023 was the hottest year since records began in 1850 and this year is even hotter. With heat waves sweeping across the globe, there is overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is not only real, but caused by human behavior. In a recent study we conducted with 59,440 participants from 63 countries, there was a very strong belief in climate change among people around the globe (86 out of a scale of 100).
Despite general agreement, however, there is evidence that partisan and ideological identities are a consistent barrier to the adoption of climate change mitigation policies, and this gap is especially large in countries where fossil fuel reliance is the highest. For example, US Republicans are six times more likely to dismiss the role that humans play in climate change than Democrats. And this partisan divide has only gotten larger over time.
How are we ever going to solve this problem without a sense of shared reality?
Our new paper offers some hope.
We conducted a global climate study, which recruited 50,000 participants across 60 countries, including Algeria, China, Denmark, Germany, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Peru, and the United States. As you can see below, polarization on climate change beliefs, policy support, and action varied widely around the world.
To capture the participants’ views on climate change, we asked them a series of questions pertaining to beliefs in climate change (e.g., “Human activities are causing climate change.”) and support for related policies (e.g., “I support increasing the number of charging stations for electric vehicles.”).
On these measures, participants around the globe showed significant political polarization, with liberals expressing belief in climate change and supporting climate-change policies to a far greater extent than conservatives—a finding consistent with previous surveys.
Despite clear differences in belief in climate change and support for relevant policy between liberals and conservatives, people across the political spectrum were willing to taking action to combat climate change. The study led by Mike Berkebile-Weinberg, Danielle Goldwert, Kim Doell, Jay and Madalina Vlasceanu, found that liberals and conservatives were equally willing to plant trees. (In fact, we paid a company to plant over 300,000 trees due to the efforts of our participants).
Specifically, we used a popular tree planting task where people needed to spend real time and energy solving puzzles in order to plant trees. This was an important measure of climate action because it took real effort—whereas measures of climate change beliefs and policy support are susceptible to social desirability. For instance, it’s easy to say you believe in climate change or support a policy, especially if it makes you look or feel good. This is why we included a measure of effortful behavior.
“Our work finds a disconnect between beliefs and behaviors among conservatives when it comes to environmental matters while, at the same time, revealing common ground with liberals when it comes to taking action”, noted Madalina Vlasceanu.
Some critics might argue that planting trees is only a drop in the bucket in terms of fighting climate change. Or, worse, that individual actions like planting trees might undermine support for systemic action—like sweeping policy changes.
But we found no evidence for this whatsoever. In fact, people who planted trees were actually more likely to support policy shifts. These two measures were positively correlated in our huge sample.
This not only addresses some of these concerns, but also helps us re-think how to address climate action. While many people are focused on the tradeoffs between individual action and systemic changes (e.g., if people focus on their own climate footprint they will ignore large social changes), our data strongly suggests these are positively related.
Indeed, other research finds that identity is what binds individual action to systematic change. As we wrote in another paper, “Individual-level solutions may support system-level change if they are internalized as part of one's social identity”. This means that getting people to take action might be the critical first step in getting them to update their beliefs, support different policies, etc—largely because it changes how they see themselves.
“Individual-level solutions may support system-level change if they are internalized as part of one's social identity”.
We should try to find actions that cut across political divides. In this case, planting trees is wonderful because it helps the environment and seems to be universally positive. Everyone love trees.
Then, once people are engaged in environmentally positive actions we should help them bind that action to their identity. If they can see themselves as “a person who cares about the environment” that is the first step towards caring about climate change. At that point, they might be more open minded to learning about the harm to environment and finding other ways they can help.
Encouraging individual action is also critical because policy change is simply not enough to address major issues. We need people to support and implement policies, to follow policies once they are implemented, and to make enough individual change at scale to make a real difference. Pitting these types of actions against one another might doom enough people into inaction.
Getting people on board for these other beliefs is difficult, of course. But we also identified which messages—or interventions—can be effective in boosting beliefs in climate change and policy support among both conservatives and liberals.
We presented a series of messages, or interventions, to participants. These interventions included, among others, the following:
Emphasizing scientific consensus on climate change (i.e., “Ninety-nine percent of expert climate change scientists agree that the Earth is warming, and climate change is happening, mainly because of human activity.”).
Touting the effectiveness of collective action in addressing climate change by providing examples of successful climate actions people took in the past.
Asking participants to write a letter to a socially close child, as a member of the future generation.
Asking participants to write a letter to a future generation member outlining what climate actions they are undertaking today to make the planet livable in 2055.
Several interventions were effective in altering beliefs and policy support across the ideological divide, in liberals and conservatives. However, the impact of these interventions was not uniform. For instance, framing certain actions as a climate change solution can backfire and decrease conservatives’ engagement. For example, informing conservatives that a majority of Americans are concerned about the climate crisis led to them planting fewer trees.
We found that three interventions—emphasizing effective collective actions, writing a letter to a future generation member, and writing a letter from the future self—boosted the climate beliefs and policy support of both liberals and conservatives. Notably, emphasizing scientific consensus stimulated liberals’ willingness to participate in a tree-planting initiative, but this message had no impact on conservatives.
“This suggests that interventions aimed at increasing conservatives’ pro-environmental behaviors should not involve their climate-change beliefs,” explains Danielle. “Instead, framing climate-change actions as beneficial for ideologically consistent reasons might be more effective in spurring action.
The bottom line is that understanding the role of identity and ideology seems critical to addressing climate change. There are certain actions that people across the political aisle are willing to take to improve the environment. And connecting those actions to a more inclusive, environmentally friendly sense of social identity might be critical in moving the needle in the fight against climate change.
This newsletter was adapted from the official NYU press release for this paper with input from Sarah Mughal. You can read the original press release here.
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News and Updates
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Catch up on the last column…
Last week, we shared some thoughts on how our norms and identity shape our vacation experience.
If you liked this newsletter, we wrote a similar article about how to talk about climate change and the problem with doomerism earlier this year. Check out the article that became one of our most popular posts below:
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