The transition towards more renewable energy will substantially increase voters’ involvement in the political decision-making process in the energy domain. Decisions such as whether to approve or reject large-scale energy programs can be complex, especially when available information cues are numerous and conflicting. Here, we hypothesize that political ideology is a strong determinant in this process, serving as a filter that voters apply when evaluating the relevance of provided information cues. We tested this hypothesis in the context of the 2017 Public Vote on the Swiss Energy Act. A sample of n = 931 Swiss voters were presented with arguments in favor or against the Energy Act, which were framed in terms of values found to be relevant for liberal and conservative ideologies, respectively. Political ideology strongly determined individual attitudes and voting preferences. Political ideology moreover moderated the influence of information provision on decisions, in that arguments congruent with voters’ political ideology were more likely to be evaluated as personally relevant and integrated into their decisions. We discuss the implications of our findings for measures on how to address ideology-based decision-making in order to ensure a well-informed electorate.
Psychological inoculations are hailed as one of the most promising evidence-based techniques to preemptively protect public support against negative information and events, especially in time-sensitive domains like climate mitigation and energy transitions. However, field testing of these techniques is limited, and their ecological validity thus remains to be investigated. In Fall 2021, a prospecting campaign for geothermal exploration deployed seismic trucks at night that created noise and seismic vibrations which could negatively affect public support for geothermal energy systems. Here, we employed a trust inoculation in a preregistered, longitudinal field study, to make the trustworthiness of the utility company salient to protect public support of geothermal energy systems against this local negative event. Contrary to our expectations, we found no evidence that the event affected participants’ public support towards renewable energy, nor that the trust inoculation influenced said support. This could have been due to the unintended negative influence of the time delay between the delivery of the trust inoculation and the negative event, as the inoculation was more effective with the longest time delay between its delivery and the negative event, but had unintended negative consequences with the shortest delay. We conclude placing these results in the growing psychological inoculations literature and providing recommendations for future field studies for psychological inoculations.
Negative persuasive attacks and misinformation are major threats to public support of governmental mandates. Here, we introduce and investigate the treatment heterogeneity of the trust inoculation, first of a new kind of sociopsychological inoculation designed around the social dimensions of persuasion to protect against negative persuasive attacks and misinformation. In two preregistered studies, we provide evidence that inoculating citizens about the trustworthiness of key energy stakeholders moderately protected citizens’ support for a renewable energy part of national energy transitions to net-zero emissions, against multiple negative persuasive attacks, in Switzerland (N=389) and in seven European countries (N=2805). Baseline trust in energy stakeholders did not moderate the effects, but the trust inoculation protected the citizens most susceptible to negative persuasive attacks. Our findings demonstrate that sociopsychological inoculations such as the trust inoculation are promising, easily implementable and scalable interventions to protect governmental mandates from multiple negative persuasive attacks and misinformation.
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