Increasing people's acceptance of anthropogenic climate change with scientific facts: Is mechanistic information more effective for environmentalists?

Abstract

Knowledge-deficit models highlight that providing novel information increases knowledge and acceptance of empirical facts. Motivated cognition models, however, highlight that people often discount new attitude-conflicting facts. Thereby, according to motivated cognition models, people's levels of global warming knowledge and anthropogenic climate change acceptance markedly reflect their preexisting environmental attitude. In four studies (N = 845), we tested the efficacy of new information to foster knowledge and alter acceptance while simultaneously controlling for environmental attitude. Despite corroborating the association of knowledge and acceptance (Study 1), providing information about the physical-chemical mechanism behind global warming did not always promote the acceptance of anthropogenic climate change (Study 2 vs. Studies 3 and 4). Moreover, acceptance increases induced with mechanistic information did not exceed acceptance gains induced with information about global warming's consequences (Study 3). By contrast, our findings corroborate environmental attitude's relevance for two central remnants of learning: knowledge (Studies 1, 3, and 4) and behavior (e.g., information seeking: Study 4).