Delphine Gardiner, CSSLab
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) Post-Doctoral Researcher Amir Tohidi, and coauthors Stefano Balietti, Samuel Fraiberger, and Anca Balietti in their new paper, Divergence Between Predicted and Actual Perception of Climate Information, explore the relationship between expected and actual persuasiveness of climate change news articles.
The authors first did 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 showed a gap between predictions and actual effects: climate change articles in practice significantly increased concern among climate change among skeptics, while most people, especially climate advocates, expected them to be ineffective.