Many people perceive climate change as psychologically distant-a set of uncertain events that might occur far in the future, impacting distant places and affecting people dissimilar to themselves. In this study, we employed construal level theory to investigate whether a climate change communication intervention could increase public engagement by reducing the psychological distance of climate change. Australian residents (N = 333) were randomly assigned to one of two treatment conditions: one framed to increase psychological distance to climate change (distal frame), and the other framed to reduce psychological distance (proximal frame). Participants then completed measures of psychological distance of climate change impacts, climate change concern, and intentions to engage in mitigation behavior. Principal components analysis indicated that psychological distance to climate change was best conceptualized as a multidimensional construct consisting of four components: geographic, temporal, social, and uncertainty. Path analysis revealed the effect of the treatment frame on climate change concern and intentions was fully mediated by psychological distance dimensions related to uncertainty and social distance. Our results suggest that climate communications framed to reduce psychological distance represent a promising strategy for increasing public engagement with climate change.
The personal assessments of the current and expected future state of the environment by 3232 community respondents in 18 nations were investigated at the local, national, and global spatial levels. These assessments were compared to a ranking of each country’s environmental quality by an expert panel. Temporal pessimism (“things will get worse”) was found in the assessments at all three spatial levels. Spatial optimism bias (“things are better here than there”) was found in the assessments of current environmental conditions in 15 of 18 countries, but not in the assessments of the future. All countries except one exhibited temporal pessimism, but significant differences between them were common. Evaluations of current environmental conditions also differed by country. Citizens’ assessments of current conditions, and the degree of comparative optimism, were strongly correlated with the expert panel’s assessments of national environmental quality. Aside from the value of understanding global trends in environmental assessments, the results have important implications for environmental policy and risk management strategies
This article describes the development and validation of a new measure of workplace incivility, the Uncivil Workplace Behavior Questionnaire (UWBQ). Participants included 5 samples of Australian adult employees (total N=368). Principal axis factoring of the UWBQ yielded 4 interpretable factors (Hostility, Privacy Invasion, Exclusionary Behavior, and Gossiping), all of which exhibited high internal consistency. The 4-factor structure received further support from a confirmatory factor analysis on a hold-out sample. A series of correlation and regression analyses revealed that the UWBQ subscales exhibited sound convergent, divergent, and concurrent validity. The psychometric properties of the UWBQ are contrasted with those of the Workplace Incivility Scale (L. M. Cortina, V. J. Magley, J. H. Williams, & R. D. Langhout, 2001), to the authors' knowledge the only other measure of the workplace incivility construct available to date.
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