Abstract
Climate change is statistical, abstract and difficult to comprehend directly. Imagining a specific, personal episode where you experience consequences of climate change in the future (episodic future thinking) may bring climate change closer, thus increasing the perceived risk of climate-related risk events. We conducted an experiment to test whether episodic future thinking increased the perceived risk of climate-related risk events and climate change in general, as compared to thinking about the future in a general, abstract manner (semantic future thinking). We also tested whether this effect is moderated by how easy it is to imagine the specific climate-related risk event initially. Participants were randomly assigned to an episodic future thinking-condition or a semantic future thinking-condition, and two of the risk events in each condition were related to flooding (difficult to imagine) and two were related to extreme temperature (easy to imagine). The results show no main effect of episodic future thinking on perceived risk, and no interaction effect with imaginability. Contrary to expectations and earlier research, this suggests that episodic future thinking may not influence risk perception.
Highlights
How people perceive the risk of climate change affects their tendency to engage in pro-environmental behavior, meaning that understanding the precursors of climate change risk perception is of paramount importance
This pre-registered experiment tested episodic future thinking (EFT) as a precursor to the perceived risk of specific risk events and climate change in general, and whether this effect would be moderated by imaginability of the risk event
Hypotheses were based on prior research suggesting that EFT may impact risk perception through vividness, perceived psychological proximity, personal relevance and vicarious evidence
Summary
Climate change is perceived as psychologically distant; people think climate change will harm people other than themselves in the far future (Carmi and Kimhi, 2015; McDonald et al, 2015; Weber, 2016). These attributes hamper human engagement and imply that interventions which serve to bring climate change closer and make it more concrete may be fruitful to explore in empirical research
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