Social Psychological Perspectives on Political Polarization: Insights and Implications for Climate Change

Abstract

Political polarization is a barrier to enacting policy solutions to global issues. Social psychology has a rich history of studying polarization, and there is an important opportunity to refine and define its contributions to the present political realities. We do so in the context of one of the most pressing modern issues: climate change. We synthesize the literature on political polarization and its applications to climate change, and we propose lines of further research and intervention design. We focus on polarization in the United States, examining other countries when literature is available. The polarization literature emphasizes two types of mechanisms: individual-level psychological processes related to political ideology and group-level psychological processes related to partisan identification. We highlight the potential intervention strategies of circumventing solution aversion, leveraging superordinate identities, correcting misperceived norms, and having trusted experts and politicians communicate about climate change. Interventions that address group-level processes can be more effective than those that address individual-level processes. These areas of research and intervention development are particularly important given that behavioral interventions grounded in scientific research are one of our most promising tools to achieve the behavioral wedge we need to address climate change and to make progress on other policy issues.

A Bibliometric Analysis of Social Identity Theory in Radicalization Research

“…• Political radicalization. For example, studying political polarization as a barrier to legislating solutions to global issues such as climate change (e.g., Cole et al, 2023).…”

Younger Americans are less politically polarized than older Americans about climate policies (but not about other policy domains)

“…The primary goal of this study is to better understand the precise interplay between political ideology and age in predicting support for climate policies. Such knowledge is valuable, as it would aid social scientists in designing psychological interventions and communication strategies that overcome partisan divides on climate policy [46]. Additionally, this manuscript helps contextualize previous research on climate policy polarization in three ways.…”

Does political identity influence the attribution of moral behaviors? A proposal for a new way to measure Moral Foundations

“…Building on the idea that moral causal attributions can be influenced by the perception of spatial distance between different political categories of left/right scale (Cole et al, 2023;Bobbio, 1996;Jost, 2021), I formulated the following hypothesis: H2: Individuals with a specific political identity will attribute a higher likelihood of engaging in immoral behavior to a person when the evaluator's and the evaluated person's political identities are at a greater distance on the left-right unidimensional axis.…”