Although scientists warn that urgent action is needed to stop climate change, public engagement continues to lag. Many social scientists say people are hesitant to act on climate change because, especially in Western industrialized countries like the U.S., it feels like such a distant threat.
Although scientists warn that urgent action is needed to stop climate change, public engagement continues to lag. Many social scientists say people are hesitant to act on climate change because, especially in Western industrialized countries like the U.S., it feels like such a distant threat.
New research from a Cornell communication professor upends that conventional thinking.
Jonathon Schuldt ’04, assistant professor of communication, says it is possible to make faraway climate impacts feel closer. But that doesn’t automatically inspire the American public to express greater support for policies that address it. The paper appeared Feb. 7 in the Journal of Environmental Psychology.
The research offers a more complex, alternative view of current assumptions in climate change communication. The conventional thinking is based on a theory in social psychology based on psychological distance. It says we generally think about things that are physically close to us in much more concrete and vivid ways compared with things that are far away.
Read more at Cornell University
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