Understanding Environmental Public Opinion by Dimension: How Heuristic Processing Mitigates High Information Costs on Complex Issues

Abstract

Public opinion matters in environmental policy making. This study examines how individuals form opinions on three distinct environmental topics-climate change, the importance of environmental protection relative to job creation, and wilderness protection. Previous research focusing on environmental concern has yielded conflicting or inconclusive results. We argue that how citizens form attitudes within the environmental domain varies across environmental dimensions and that high information costs cause citizens to engage in heuristic processing to form their opinions. We empirically test our hypothesis by analyzing original data collected from the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey. We find that with more complex issues, citizens rely on familiar shortcuts such as party identification, ideology, and the media. With less complex issues, demographic factors are predictors of attitudes, lending support to arguments that citizens use familiar shortcuts when processing political and policy information.

Rural population and global citizenship: information, media and opinions on world problems

“…We agree with Rugeley and Gerlach (2012) when they say that with more complex problems, citizens rely on familiar shortcuts such as party identification, ideology and the media. If the information reaches them via a forwarder who is part of the same network, this generates additional confidence and credibility.…”

“…As mentioned earlier, there is a second ingredient when it comes to forming an opinion or attitude, namely predispositions (Zaller 1992). Rugeley and Gerlach (2012) argue that the way in which people build their attitudes can only be modified at high cost, so that citizens receive the information and heuristically process it to form their opinions. They found that with more complex problems, citizens rely on familiar shortcuts such as party identification, ideology and the media.…”

“…Much of the recent research in the global citizenship field has analysed the construction of opinions, perceptions and motivations in favour of the environment and against climate change (Leggewie and Welzer 2010;Rugeley and Gerlach 2012;Robison and Jansson-Boyd 2013;Rajapaksa et al 2018). There are few studies, however, that analyse rural people's opinions about global problems and their reasons for supporting or rejecting cooperation and development policies.…”

Public Support for Policies: Public Opinion and Policy Making

“…Assessing surveyed public support for policies related to issues of low salience is problematic for several reasons. First, citizens are likely to construct attitudes ad hoc or based on cues, policy characteristics, and other variables, which are usually not monitored in the survey [Rugeley, Gerlach 2012;Bernauer, Gampfer 2015]. Second, as support can involve more active engagement, other responses would be more suitable in cases the issue is not salient -the policy can be, for example, tolerated, or the respondent does not even care what policy would be implemented (if any).…”

“…Different remedies to the problem of citizens providing answers to survey questions they do not know much about have been proposed in the literature, including attempts to provide respondents (and citizens) with more information, arguing that citizens are able to reach meaningful opinions with the use of shortcuts and heuristics [e.g., Rugeley, Gerlach 2012], using the "Don't know" or "No opinion" response options [Althaus 2003], attention checks [Huang et al 2012;Meade, Craig 2012], question filters, measures of opinion intensity etc. [Price, Neijens 1997 for a short overview; see Althaus 2003], and aggregation of attitudes [Erikson 2007;Page, Shapiro 2010].…”