“Proximising” climate change reconsidered: A construal level theory perspective

By Adrian Brügger, Thomas A. Morton, S. Dessai. 2016

211 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Reducing the psychological distance of climate change has repeatedly been proposed as one strategy to increase individuals' motivation to respond to climate change. From the perspective of construal level theory, decreasing psychological distance should not itself influence people's willingness to act but change the processes that underlie individual decision-making. We conducted two experiments in which we manipulated the psychological distance of climate change. We found that participants with a distant focus relied more on scepticism to represent risks and make decisions about supporting climate change, whereas participants with a proximal perspective relied more on fear when making such judgements. However, the predicted Fear × Distance interaction was only found when self-reported fear rather than experimentally manipulated fear was used as a moderator. Our results suggest that simply proximising won't increase engagement and call for a more differentiated perspective on the effects of psychological distance in the context of climate change.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f9670075bbdefca71d878dfffb7319a2c425b69f

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Applied Psychology

1. L. Rickard
2. Z. Janet Yang
3. John E. Marsh
4. Linden J. Ball
5. Jonathon P. Schuldt
6. Beth H. Richardson
7. Anna Keller

In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

1. Z. Janet Yang
2. John E. Marsh
3. M. Mildenberger
4. Linden J. Ball
5. Jonathon P. Schuldt
6. L. Rickard
7. Beth H. Richardson
8. Anna Keller

In Sociology and Political Science

1. L. Rickard
2. Z. Janet Yang
3. John E. Marsh
4. M. Mildenberger
5. Linden J. Ball
6. Jonathon P. Schuldt
7. Jennifer R. Marlon
8. Beth H. Richardson

Citations in the corpus

• How will climate change shape climate opinion? (2019, background): “whereas a more proximate perspective may be more emotionally engaging [104].”
• A systematic review of the psychological distance of climate change: Towards the development of an evidence-based construct (2021, background): “Similarly, multiple studies found no differences in policy support (e.g., Brügger et al., 2016; Chu & Yang, 2019, 2020b; Fesenfeld & Rinscheid, 2021; Stanley et al., 2021), and those that did provided mixed evidence, some finding more support in distant conditions (Fox et al., 2020; Kysel ´ a et…”
• Does reduced psychological distance increase climate engagement? On the limits of localizing climate change (2018, background): “…for climate change mitigation and adaptation policy, thus complementing recent work arguing that distance manipulations in climate change messaging, in and of themselves, should not be expected to uniformly increase support and action for addressing climate change (Brügger et al., 2015, 2016).”