Predicting climate change risk perception and willingness to act

By Belinda Xie, M. Brewer, Brett K. Hayes, Rachel I. McDonald, Ben R. Newell. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 2019

219 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract We extended a recent model of climate change risk perception (van der Linden, 2015) to predict the risk perception of Australians and their willingness to engage in mitigation behaviours (N = 921). Affect, mitigation response inefficacy, and descriptive norms were the most important predictors of risk perception, highlighting the influence of affective, cognitive, and socio-cultural factors. Affect and mitigation response inefficacy were also important predictors of behavioural willingness, but socio-cultural influences (free-market ideology, prescriptive norms, and biospheric values) played a relatively larger role in explaining the variance of behavioural willingness. Structural equation modelling provided further evidence that risk perception and behavioural willingness are separable constructs, as some factors in the model had direct effects on willingness independent of risk perception. We discuss the need for future research to develop a comprehensive model of behavioural willingness, and the need for public communication to combat mitigation response inefficacy.

Subfields: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f58d4e0c353cf2bf31a971fef745e70fd3b17f59

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In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

How social norms are often a barrier to addressing climate change but can be part of the solution (2020, background): “…to take action or hold beliefs that people should take action to address climate change, predict seeing climate change as a greater threat (van der Linden, 2015) and predict the extent to which people are willing to take personal and societal action to address global warming (Xie et al., 2019).”
Risk perceptions of COVID-19 around the world (2020, methodology): “Consistent with the literature in the domain of environmental risk (e.g. see Leiserowitz 2006; van der Linden 2015; Xie et al. 2019), experiential and socio-cultural factors explained most of the variance in our risk perception models across all countries in comparison to cognition (knowledge) and…”