Climate change is a critical global challenge that requires immediate action (IPCC, 2019). The fields of social and environmental psychology have made significant contributions to understanding how people think, feel, and act on climate change (Fielding et al., 2014;van der Linden, 2015). Research has identified key psychological barriers to climate action (Gifford, 2011), and the determinants of individuals' intentions to take action to mitigate climate change (Lubell et al., 2007;Roser-Renouf et al., 2014. For example, social factors such as social consensus among friends and family about anthropogenic
This article examines whether there is a collective climate action intention-behaviour gap amongst the British public, and the role of social identification in bridging the gap. Using a nationally representative survey (n=1100), we measured participant’s intentions to take collective climate action (such as volunteering, sharing climate change information with friends, protesting), and actual behavioural engagement with Extinction Rebellion (XR), a large-scale environmental movement. We also measured psychological factors based on the Social Identity Model of Pro-Environmental Action (SIMPEA) model, such as social identification, and socio-demographic characteristics. We found 50% of the participants were inclined abstainers, i.e., they expressed intentions to take collective climate action despite not having performed any actions with XR so far. Based on a moderated mediation model, we found that social identification predicted behavioural engagement with XR but did not moderate the collective climate action intention-behaviour gap. We discuss why this may be the case, including the role of public perceptions of how effective and disruptive XR's actions are.
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