From Non‐Believer to Believer: What Leads People to Change Their Climate Views

Abstract

Studies have highlighted the political, economic, and psychological factors in the debate over anthropogenic climate change—a hegemony approach—but have rarely focused on the stories and possibilities of people's transitions from climate change non‐believer to climate change believer. Based on publicly accessible narratives, this study examines the stories of those who have switched from non‐believer to believer—a narrative approach—and the dilemmas involved in those switches. Our investigation illuminates that a transition to climate change believer is a cultural and moral matter based on changing social relations of knowledge and what people regard as ignorable. We find that narratives of transition commonly describe interrelated shifts in three social relational factors: the narrator's notions of self, material reality, and justice. We term this contextualized transformative experience a relational rupture. Our narrative approach thus contextualizes climate change denialism within a person's web of social relations, not the hegemony of climate change communication alone. Moreover, we suggest that, since public debate and polarization on scientific topics such as climate change, vaccination, and COVID‐19 are socially situated, they may potentially be socially bridged.