How you talk about climate change matters: A communication network perspective on epistemic skepticism and belief strength

Abstract

A population’s attitudes toward climate change can strongly influence governmental policies as well as community and individual climate-related behaviors. These attitudes have been explained with a variety of factors, including cultural worldviews, environmental attitudes, political ideology, knowledge of climate change, severe weather exposure, and sociodemographic characteristics. These studies typically assume an individual forms attitudes on the basis of preexisting values or beliefs and do not account for dynamic social interaction as a source of influence. This study introduces a network perspective that accounts for the social embeddedness of individuals, using network variables to predict climate attitudes, including homophily, network strength, attitude diversity, centrality, network size, and network valence. An exploratory factor analysis identified two distinct attitudinal dimensions: climate change epistemic skepticism and belief strength. Using egocentric data from a nationally representative survey collected in 2011, this study found that network variables were significant in predicting both climate attitude dimensions; hierarchical regression analyses accounting for other known predictors found two different predictive models for epistemic skepticism and belief strength. Homophily, network strength, attitude diversity, and network valence predicted epistemic skepticism (R2change=4.8%), while centrality and network strength predicted belief strength (R2change=8.9%). The analyses also found support for cultural factors as significant predictors of climate attitudes, particularly Christianity and cultural worldviews. The results of this study suggest that interpersonal influence through communication networks is a promising avenue for continued research, and should be included in studies of climate attitude formation and change.