News on climate change is more persuasive than expected
In a new paper, Computational Social Science Lab postdoctoral researcher Amir Tohidi and colleagues find that exposure to articles about climate change significantly increases climate change concerns among skeptics.
2 min. read
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) postdoctoral researcher Amir Tohidi, along with coauthors Stefano Balietti, Samuel Fraiberger, and Anca Balietti, explore the relationship between expected and actual persuasiveness of climate change news articles in their new paper.
The authors first conducted 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 show 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.
The results reveal 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 expect that such persuasive messages would have no meaningful impact on skeptics.
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