The Impacts of Political Cues and Practical Information on Climate Change Decisions

The impacts of political cues and practical information on climate change decisions View the table of contents for this issue, or go to the journal homepage for more 2015 Environ. [...] The Zillow® map of homes for sale in Savannah, GA that participants used for Study 1 and Study 2 is on the left. [...] The elevation map that participants used for both Study 1 and Study 2 is on the right. [...] There was a significant interaction between Aid and Framing for both dependent variables. As seen in figure 4 (left-hand side), with the no cue and elevation frame conditions, participants with Risk Finder saw significantly greater risk than did those without it. [...] When asked to consider both factors, believers saw greater risk, whereas nonbelievers saw less. That interaction (between Frame and Belief) disappeared for participants who had access to the Risk Finder decision aid and, with it, the opportunity for greater immersion in practical details of the decision. [...] Having Risk Finder heightened perceived risk and sensitivity to the availability of flood insurance for the no cue and elevation frames, but not the other two, suggesting that mentioning global warming sufficed to evoke a greater sense of risk. In Study 1, political identify was implicit, and manipulated indirectly through task framing. [...] Table S1 in supplemental material presents additional results. As in Study 1, there was no main effect for Belief on overall perceived risk or on sensitivity to the avail- ability of flood insurance. [...] In both of the present studies, participants respon- ded to such information in orderly ways. They saw greater risk, as expressed in their reduced willingness to move to a flood-prone area, when flood insurance was unavailable, when global warming was men- tioned, and when they could learn more about flood- ing risks using the Risk Finder decision aid. [...] That difference effectively dis- appeared in Study 2, where participants expressed their beliefs about global warming before doing the task. Thus, it appears that even the simplest version of our task (with no cues and without Risk Finder), parti- cipants were sufficiently engaged in the details of the decision to make political identity largely irrelevant. [...] should we take political action?) Drawing on self-affirmation [32] and reactance theory [44], we speculate that the one difference between believers and nonbelievers (with the eleva- tion + global warming frame in Study 1) arose because nonbelievers, without the immersion of Risk Finder, found it heavy handed—as though they were being manipulated into endorsing global warming as a price for acknowl