Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has understandably dominated public discourse, crowding out other important issues such as climate change. Currently, if climate change enters the arena of public debate, it primarily does so in direct relation to the pandemic. In two experiments, we investigated (1) whether portraying the response to the COVID-19 threat as a “trial run” for future climate action would increase climate-change concern and mitigation support, and (2) whether portraying climate change as a concern that needs to take a “back seat” while focus lies on economic recovery would decrease climate-change concern and mitigation support. We found no support for the effectiveness of a trial-run frame in either experiment. In Experiment 1, we found that a back-seat frame reduced participants’ support for mitigative action. In Experiment 2, the back-seat framing reduced both climate change concern and mitigation support; a combined inoculation and refutation was able to offset the drop in climate concern but not the reduction in mitigation support.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 101464 |
| Journal | Journal of Environmental Psychology |
| Volume | 70 |
| Early online date | 2 Jul 2020 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 31 Aug 2020 |
Funding
Ullrich Ecker receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC); Stephan Lewandowsky consults for, and collaborates with, the Joint Research Center of the European Commission. He receives funding from the ARC, the ESRC (via CREST), and the Volkswagen Foundation. All other authors declare no competing interests. This work was supported by an Australian Research Council grant ( DP160103596 ) awarded to UE and SL. The funder had no role in study design or collection, analysis and interpretation of data. We thank Charles Hanich for research assistance.
