Reducing, and bridging, the psychological distance of climate change

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2020.101388Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Proximising climate change in news focusses on local consequences.

  • Proximising reduces the psychological socio-spatial distance of climate change.

  • Proximising indirectly predicts climate protective engagement.

  • Communicating a global identity bridges the psychological socio-spatial distance.

Abstract

Science communication aims to motivate action on climate change. We examined the usefulness of two related communication strategies: proximising climate change with news focussing on local impacts, and bridging psychological distance by raising the salience of people's global identity as part of humanity. We first examined the often implicitly assumed process underlying proximising, namely reducing the psychological socio-spatial distance of climate change, which in turn might make the issue more relevant for people, which in turn might promote behavioural engagement. Second, we argued that when people consider themselves as part of a global society, proximising may not be necessary as people perceive the relevance of distant impacts. We conducted an experiment with UK residents (N = 400) with two between subjects factors: proximity of communication on climate change (proximal or distant) and global identity salience (communicated or not). Communicating proximity (vs. distance) via a news text on climate change consequences for either the UK or Bangladesh reduced the psychological socio-spatial distance of climate change and indirectly predicted climate protective behaviour through lower psychological socio-spatial distance and higher relevance attribution. While these indirect relations were small, stronger relations might arise if people repeatedly receive local information. Participants for whom global identity was made salient (using a video showing a man dancing with people all over the world) exhibited no decreases in evaluating the relevance of the news text as their psychological socio-spatial distance of climate change increased (compared to those who viewed a control video). This indicates that global identity salience can bridge the psychological socio-spatial distance of climate change. We conclude that it is useful to report local consequences of climate change, or to communicate global connectedness if global consequences of climate change are described.

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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