In this blogpost we wish to highlight the following article as a candidate for a set of Robustness Reports:
Većkalov, B., Geiger, S. J., Bartoš, F., White, M. P., Rutjens, B. T., Van Harreveld, F., Stablum, F., Akın, B., Aldoh, A., Bai, J., Berglund, F., Zimic, A. B., Broyles, M., Catania, A., Chen, A., Chorzępa, M., Farahat, E., Götz, J., Hoter-Ishay, B., . . . Van Der Linden, S. (2024). A 27-country test of communicating the scientific consensus on climate change. Nature Human Behaviour, 8(10), 1892–1905. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-01928-2
The abstract:
Communicating the scientific consensus that human-caused climate change is real increases climate change beliefs, worry and support for public action in the United States. In this preregistered experiment, we tested two scientific consensus messages, a classic message on the reality of human-caused climate change and an updated message additionally emphasizing scientific agreement that climate change is a crisis. Across online convenience samples from 27 countries (n = 10,527), the classic message substantially reduces misperceptions (d = 0.47, 95% CI (0.41, 0.52)) and slightly increases climate change beliefs (from d = 0.06, 95% CI (0.01, 0.11) to d = 0.10, 95% CI (0.04, 0.15)) and worry (d = 0.05, 95% CI (−0.01, 0.10)) but not support for public action directly. The updated message is equally effective but provides no added value. Both messages are more effective for audiences with lower message familiarity and higher misperceptions, including those with lower trust in climate scientists and right-leaning ideologies. Overall, scientific consensus messaging is an effective, non-polarizing tool for changing misperceptions, beliefs and worry across different audiences.
We suggest this article for reanalysis due to the relevance of the findings. While both the scientific consensus on climate change and the crisis agreement were underestimated on average, two different messages reduced these misperceptions. The messages were more effective among individuals with lower trust in scientists and among those who underestimated the scientific consensus. However, the updated message, which additionally emphasized scientific agreement on climate change as a crisis, did not have any added value compared to the classic message. Independent reanalyses could help increase confidence in the findings and inform future interventions and climate change messaging.
The data are publicly available at https://osf.io/qfwkt/overview.
Author
Jari Holla
References
Većkalov, B., Geiger, S. J., Bartoš, F., White, M. P., Rutjens, B. T., Van Harreveld, F., Stablum, F., Akın, B., Aldoh, A., Bai, J., Berglund, F., Zimic, A. B., Broyles, M., Catania, A., Chen, A., Chorzępa, M., Farahat, E., Götz, J., Hoter-Ishay, B., . . . Van Der Linden, S. (2024). A 27-country test of communicating the scientific consensus on climate change. Nature Human Behaviour, 8(10), 1892–1905. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-01928-2
Featured image from GenAI