Numeric social-media posts engage people with climate science

Abstract

Innumeracy (lack of math skills) among non-scientists often leads climate scientists and others to avoid communicating numbers due to concerns that the public won’t understand them and may disengage. However, people report preferring to receive numbers; providing them also improves some decisions. Here, we demonstrate that providing numbers in climate-related social-media posts increased engagement from 11.5–46.7% in two pre-registered observational studies (climate scientists on twitter, N = 8,003,920 likes and retweets; climate subreddit, N = 17,501 posts and comments). Results of a pre-registered experiment (N = 212) further revealed that providing precise numeric information about climate consequences, in particular, led to more engagement and greater trust and perceptions of an expert messenger. Because science on social media has the potential to reach more people, scientists and climate communicators might want to harness the power of numbers to increase public concern regarding this defining issue of our time.