Abstract
Education may encourage personal and collective responses to climate change, but climate education has proven surprisingly difficult and complex. Self-perception of knowledge and intelligence represent one factor that may impact willingness to learn about climate change. We explored this possibility with a case study in Raleigh, North Carolina in 2015 (n = 200). Our goal was to test how gender and ethnicity influenced perceptions people had of their own climate change knowledge. Survey respondents were asked how strongly they agreed with the statement “I feel knowledgeable about climate change” (1 = strongly disagree, and 5 = strongly agree). Our survey instrument also included demographic questions about race, age, income, gender, and education, as well as respondent’s experience with natural disasters and drought. We observed an interaction between education and gender where women’s self-perceived knowledge was higher than men among people with low levels of educational attainment, but was higher for men than women among people with high levels of educational attainment. In addition, minority respondents self-reported lower perceived climate change knowledge than white respondents, regardless of educational attainment. This study enhances our understanding of the gender gap in self-perceptions of climate knowledge by suggesting it is contingent on educational attainment. This could be the result of stereotype-threat experienced by women and minorities, and exacerbated by educational systems. Because people who question their knowledge are often more able to learn, particularly in ideologically charged contexts, highly educated women and minorities may be more successful learning about climate change than white men.
Highlights
Educational efforts are often promoted as antidotes to apathy and denial associated with environmental issues
Education interacted with gender: highly educated women had a lower self-perception of climate change knowledge than less educated women, whereas highly educated men had a higher self-perception of climate change knowledge than less educated men (Table 1; Fig 1)
Our results contribute to literature on self-perceived climate knowledge by suggesting gender differences may be contingent on educational attainment
Summary
Educational efforts are often promoted as antidotes to apathy and denial associated with environmental issues. They found that those who subscribe to a worldview that ties authority to conspicuous social rankings become less concerned about the risks of climate change with increasing scientific literacy and numeracy Those with worldviews that favor less regimented forms of social organization and greater collective attention to the individual respond to climate change education with increasing concern. This gap is attributed to identity-protective cognition, wherein the holders of certain worldviews use and credit the information that is supportive of their own values and opinions [8], [11,12,13]. Adolescents, appear more capable of transcending their personal ideology to learn about climate change than adults [14], [15]
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