Reducing, and bridging, the psychological distance of climate change
Introduction
The majority of scientists express urgency in limiting climate change to secure the quality of life on Earth (Maibach, Myers, & Leiserowitz, 2014; Ripple et al., 2017). Science communication thus aims to motivate public climate protective actions. We examined the usefulness of two related communication strategies: proximising climate change (Brügger, Morton, & Dessai, 2016) with news focussing on local impacts; and bridging the psychological socio-spatial distance (Spence, Poortinga, & Pidgeon, 2012) by raising the salience of people's global identity as part of humanity (McFarland, Webb, & Brown, 2012; Reese, 2016).
Section snippets
Proximising climate change
Many people perceive climate change as a phenomenon that primarily impacts others in remote places (Milfont, 2010; Spence et al., 2012). Proximising climate change (Brügger et al., 2016) by focussing on local instead of remote consequences has been recommended as a promising communication strategy to bring the issue closer to people (e.g., Shome & Marx, 2009; Van der Linden, Maibach, & Leiserowitz, 2015).
These recommendations often refer to the concept of psychological distance which is
Participants, design, and procedure
We used a quota sample of the UK consisting of N = 508 UK residents (n = 264 females, M = 47.5 years of age, SD = 16.3; Supplement 1.1). Participants completed the study online and, after completing informed consent, were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions or a fifth control condition in a 2 (video: salience of global identity vs. control) × 2 (news text: communicated proximity vs. distance) + 1 (control: no stimuli) between-subjects design (see randomisation check in
Results and discussion
We conducted all analyses using the statistical environment R (Supplement 1.5). Randomisation and manipulation checks were successful (Supplement 2.1 and 2.2). Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) and Rasch analysis showed decent fit statistics of our scales. However, we had to exclude some participants due to missing or implausible values, leaving a sample of n = 383 (Supplement 2.3). Bivariate correlations are provided in Supplement 2.4; descriptives differentiated for conditions in Supplement
Conclusion
Our findings indicate that proximising climate change can reduce the psychological socio-spatial distance of climate change and has the potential to indirectly motivate climate protective engagement through this reduced distance and a higher relevance attributed to the issue of climate change. However, when people consider themselves as part of a global society, proximising may not be necessary as people perceive the relevance of distant impacts. From a practical perspective, both proximising
Funding
This research was funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (grant number EP/K002589/1).
Ethical approval
The Ethics Committee of the University of Hohenheim, Germany, approved the study.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Laura S. Loy: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Visualization, Writing - original draft. Alexa Spence: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Methodology, Supervision, Writing - review & editing.
Declaration of competing interest
None.
Acknowledgements
We thank Patrick Fissler, Sophie Kitzmann, Doris Teutsch, and Sabine Trepte for their support in designing the study.
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