Threat and Anxiety in the Climate Debate—An Agent-Based Model to Investigate Climate Scepticism and Pro-Environmental Behaviour

Abstract

In order to meet the challenges of sustainable development, it is of utmost importance to involve all relevant decision makers in this process. These decision makers are diverse, including governments, corporations and private citizens. Since the latter group is the largest and the majority of decisions relevant to the future of the environment is made by that group, great effort has been put into communicating relevant research results to them. The hope is that well-informed citizens make well-informed choices and thus act in a sustainable way. However, this common but drastic simplification that more information about climate change automatically leads to pro-environmental behaviour is fundamentally flawed. It completely neglects the complex social-psychological processes that occur if people are confronted with threatening information. In reality, the defence mechanisms that are activated in such situations can also work against the goal of sustainable development, as experimental studies showed. Based on these findings, we propose an agent-based model to understand the relation between threatening climate change information, anxiety, climate change scepticism, environmental self-identity and pro-environmental behaviour. We find that the exposure to information about climate change, in general, does not increase the pro-environmental intent unless several conditions regarding the individual's values and information density are met.

Anxiety and Climate Change: A Validation of the Climate Anxiety Scale in a German-Speaking Quota Sample and an Investigation of Psychological Correlates

“…As predicted, the more climate anxiety people experienced, the fewer climate-relevant self-protective strategies they used. This confirms findings by Kapeller and Jäger (2020) who showed climate anxiety and denial to be negatively related in a simulation study. One exception in our study is avoidance: People with climate anxiety tend to avoid engaging with climate change information in their everyday lives.…”

“…This likely influences our study because we analyze individuals living in a northern liberal culture. Furthermore, if people are able to resolve their anxiety by acting pro-environmentally (Kapeller & Jäger, 2020), they may as a consequence experience more hope and report less anxiety (Kleres & Wettergren, 2017;Ojala, 2012). Given these mixed findings on the relationship between fear, worry, anxiety, and pro-environmental indicators, and the finding by Clayton and Karazsia (2020) upon which we built our study, we expected:…”

“…Nevertheless, Clayton and Karazsia (2020) found climate anxiety and proenvironmental indicators to be unrelated. Kapeller and Jäger (2020) showed that more anxiety is not necessarily associated with more pro-environmental behavior. In fact, relations between reported anxiety and pro-environmental indicators may not be straightforward.…”

“…In fact, relations between reported anxiety and pro-environmental indicators may not be straightforward. Perceiving severe threat and fear can be overwhelming and lead to apathy, especially when one feels incapable to deal with the threat (Kapeller & Jäger, 2020;Miller et al, 2009). General emotion management also depends on people's cultural backgrounds and socio-material contexts.…”

A Longitudinal Analysis of the Creation of Environmental Identity and Attitudes towards Energy Sustainability Using the Framework of Identity Theory and Big Data Analysis

“…It is embedded in being subject to nature and is a motivator of a wide range of pro-environmental behavior [21]. Furthermore, environmental identity is related to affective qualities linked to values associated with nature and environmental rights [22]. Finally, it is deeply rooted in the individual's worldviews about nature and society [23].…”