Confirmation Bias in Seeking Climate Information: Employing Relative Search Volume to Predict Partisan Climate Opinions

Abstract

In an increasingly digitized world, online information-seeking (OIS) behaviors have reflected people’s intentions and constituted a critical component in synthesizing public opinion. Climate change is among the gravest threats facing the world today, and previous studies have adopted OIS data to gauge public interest in climate change. However, such studies have ignored the psychological attributes of search keywords and the role of social identities in influencing OIS. This study explores whether search strategies align with the expected confirmation biases of regions with different partisan beliefs. We use spatial web search trends to show the significant differences in the search keywords adopted by the Democrat-majority (“climate change”) versus the Republican-majority (“global warming”) regions of the United States. Furthermore, using the region-level search and survey data (2008–2018), we demonstrate that the preferential use of search keywords can predict climate opinions. This study concludes by discussing the significant findings and the open questions for future work.