Comparing the explicit and implicit attitudes of energy stakeholders and the public towards carbon capture and storage

Abstract

Research on the attitudes of energy stakeholders and the general public towards Carbon Capture and Storage is a necessary starting point for the industry to understand the development trajectory of the technology. However, previous studies have only used explicit approaches, such as self-report questionnaires, to measure attitudes. Some researchers have argued that explicit measures are not able to reflect participants’ true thoughts. To investigate the potential gap between the results of explicit tests and the true attitudes of participants, this study uses the implicit association test, to detect the attitudes towards environmental technology for the first time (to our knowledge), by comparing the explicit and implicit attitudes of energy stakeholders and the public towards carbon capture and storage. The results indicate that energy stakeholders hold favorable attitudes, whereas public vary across the two tests. Public show supportive attitudes in the explicit test, but present their concerns about the risk of carbon capture and storage in the implicit test. The inconsistencies between the explicit and implicit test results among the public indicate that researchers need to be very cautious about the method they use to understand attitudes towards carbon capture and storage as well as other environmental technologies. Further, we suggested that implicit association test would be an effective and easy-to-use approach to complement traditional explicit tests to discover participants’ real attitudes towards environmental technologies in the future research.