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Abstract
Extending preceding environmental discounting studies, we examined the role of response efficacy (in low, control, and high conditions) in participants’ valuation of climate-change concern and action across four psychological distance dimensions (temporal, spatial, social, and probabilistic). Participants gave ratings of concern and action in the context of two hypothetical scenarios which were directly related to two different threats (droughts and floods) posed by unmitigated climate change. Rachlin’s hyperboloid discount functions fit the data well. The previously observed gap between concern and action ratings was not replicated in the main analyses, but was seen in the ratings at the minimum distance values. Response efficacy differentially affected ratings of concern and action at the minimum distance values for the temporal, social, and probabilistic dimensions, but differentially affected discount values (k) only for the probabilistic dimension. Compared to their level of concern with the environmental threat, participants who were led to believe that their actions were not efficacious were less willing to engage in mitigation behaviors than participants who were led to believe that their actions were efficacious. The insights gained through the current research effort may be valuable for policymaking as well as intervention design aiming to increase societal mitigation and adaptation efforts.
Highlights
The scientific consensus on climate change is clear: It is a global crisis
Extending preceding environmental discounting studies, we examined the role of response efficacy in participants’ valuation of climate-change concern and action across four psychological distance dimensions
Interventions to increase pro-environmental behavior that target environmental concern, for example, need to ensure that their target population perceives their actions to be efficacious with respect to the threat causing the concern
Summary
The scientific consensus on climate change is clear: It is a global crisis. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2018) stressed that individual behavioral changes are key in restricting the http://www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/se. Hypothesis 1: Ratings of willingness to act and concern in relation to environmental outcomes are best described by a hyperbolic/hyperboloid model of discounting across temporal, probability, spatial, and social discounting tasks. Hypothesis 3: Ratings of willingness to act and concern in relation to environmental outcomes are discounted more when perceived response efficacy is high rather than low across temporal, probability, spatial, and social discounting tasks. 2.3 Discounting Measures 2.3.1 Climate-Change Concern After each scenario at every psychological distance (temporal, spatial, social, and probability), we asked “How concerned are you about the effects of climate change on food shortages/floods? We computed the participants’ individual discount rates, k (Equation 1), from their subjective ratings of climate-change concern and action for each scenario and dimension with the Discounting Model Selector version 1.8.2 (http://www.smallnstats.com/). Given that ratings are related to k values, we applied a Bonferroni correction to the results of all ANOVA, such that a p value less than .025 was required to reach significance. 2.5.3 Scenario Relatability and Realism We ran two t tests with perceived realism and relatability scores as dependent variables and the type of scenario (drought/flooding) as within-subjects independent variables. 2.5.4 Manipulation Check We ran two independent-samples t tests with the participants’ perceived response efficacy for each scenario as dependent variables and the level of response efficacy (low/high) as the independent between-subjects factor
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