Reducing, and bridging, the psychological distance of climate change

Abstract

Science communication aims to motivate action on climate change. We examined the usefulness of two related communication strategies: proximising climate change with news focussing on local impacts, and bridging psychological distance by raising the salience of people's global identity as part of humanity. We first examined the often implicitly assumed process underlying proximising, namely reducing the psychological socio-spatial distance of climate change, which in turn might make the issue more relevant for people, which in turn might promote behavioural engagement. Second, we argued that when people consider themselves as part of a global society, proximising may not be necessary as people perceive the relevance of distant impacts. We conducted an experiment with UK residents (N = 400) with two between subjects factors: proximity of communication on climate change (proximal or distant) and global identity salience (communicated or not). Communicating proximity (vs. distance) via a news text on climate change consequences for either the UK or Bangladesh reduced the psychological socio-spatial distance of climate change and indirectly predicted climate protective behaviour through lower psychological socio-spatial distance and higher relevance attribution. While these indirect relations were small, stronger relations might arise if people repeatedly receive local information. Participants for whom global identity was made salient (using a video showing a man dancing with people all over the world) exhibited no decreases in evaluating the relevance of the news text as their psychological socio-spatial distance of climate change increased (compared to those who viewed a control video). This indicates that global identity salience can bridge the psychological socio-spatial distance of climate change. We conclude that it is useful to report local consequences of climate change, or to communicate global connectedness if global consequences of climate change are described.