PhD position Social cohesion and climate polarization: how to communicate effectively about climate change

Aim of project

Climate change presents a major challenge to social cohesion. Mitigation of global warming depends on coordinated, community-wide action to eliminate the emissions of greenhouse gases, and such action is possible only if social cohesion is maintained. Yet climate change has become a polarizing issue. Fossil fuel interests are actively attempting to undermine climate action, using a range of divisive strategies. We need to urgently find ways to communicate about climate change which effectively convey accurate information and build the cohesion that forms the basis for mitigation action. The current project addresses this challenge, combining epistemological, sociological and psychological perspectives.

Project description

There is increasing attention for climate communication, but many studies take place in isolation from work on disinformation and how to address it. Recent studies on climate disinformation campaigns reveal that they involve far more than just circulating falsehoods: they constitute influence campaigns which profoundly target people’s thinking, including trust attitudes, social norms, emotions and deeply rooted ideologies. Climate psychology indicates that climate change provokes a number of different defensive reactions. Many people find themselves concerned about climate change on some level but experience a kind of disconnect from it in their daily thoughts and lives. In this way, people try to shield themselves from emotions such as fear, guilt or overwhelm. In addition, defensive psychology is socially structured by norms about what is acceptable to talk about as well as by social identities. Yet, many existing approaches to climate communication feature calls for greater ambition, farther reaching lifestyle changes or more involvement in the issue by the audience. It is possible that this ambitious style of messaging actually backfires, since it has the potential to exacerbate rather than alleviate more defensive kinds of reactions. It may in fact reinforce the identity divisions stoked by disinformation campaigns. Indeed, climate polarization is seen to be strongly correlated with polarization over a number of apparently disconnected and divisive issues. For example, US research found that climate attitudes are strongly linked to political partisanship.

Studies on social influence indicate that in some contexts, too much dissimilarity between either the two parties involved or the message and the pre-existing view of the recipient may produce a repulsive social influence that could increase opinion differences (Flache et al., 2017). The presence of such a repulsive influence can lead to more fragmented or polarized communities at the macrolevel and may hinder attempts at coordinated action.

The project is based on a new hypothesis about climate communication: a more moderate style of climate messaging may actually be more effective than the standard methods, both in supporting the quality of climate decision-making and in maintaining social cohesion in the process. More moderate messaging styles will respect the scientifically established needs of tackling the climate crisis but at the same time keep demands on the audience modest and focused. They may do so, for example, by messaging sequentially, emphasizing improvement rather than achievement, proposing small steps rather than calling for large changes to avoid resistance, explicitly counteracting identity divisions inflamed by disinformation campaigns, and/or focusing on collective rather than individual contributions to climate policy.

In the first phase of the project, candidate strategies for more moderate climate communication will be formulated and tested against a range of normative considerations, including support for timely decision-making on climate policy, depolarizing effects and their ability to maintain social cohesion. In the second phase, the developed strategies will be tested, both theoretically and empirically.

The project will deliver recommendations for more effective climate communication strategies which maintain social cohesion and can be attuned to specific societal contexts. The recommendations will be solidly informed by the latest research on social influence and sensitive to the pervasive role of disinformation campaigns on climate change.

Research Design

The project will develop and articulate the main hypothesis, devising candidates for effective climate communication strategies. It will be informed by a philosophical analysis of what is normatively desirable for climate communication among a number of dimensions, with a particular focus on the preservation of social cohesion. It will also synthesize insights from a number of independently developing areas of research (primarily climate science, philosophy, psychology and sociology) in service of designing a well-supported communication strategy.

The theoretical development will draw on computational models and will integrate modelling frameworks in social epistemology (e.g., Henderson & Gebharter, 2021) with social influence model approaches from sociology (e.g., Flache et al., 2017). This will help elaborate an understanding of the context, in which the influence of the communication competes with the influence of disinformation campaigns. In particular, it will elucidate the interaction between the epistemic and the affective mechanisms at work in driving opinions. The project will explore how the messaging style can be most effectively attuned to the given societal context and existing group identities.

The theoretical work will provide the basis for an empirical test of the main hypothesis. The experimental study will build upon and further develop existing online experiment paradigms that assess the spreading of falsehoods in social networks. It will investigate influence on normative issues in addition to factual issues to test how agreement with normative statements about climate change behaviour depends on the moderation of the statement, the network embedding of the sender and receiver of the corresponding statements and their respective group or ideological identities.

Core readings

Flache, A., Mäs, M., Feliciani, T., Chattoe-Brown, E., Deffuant, G., Huet, S., & Lorenz, J. (2017). Models of social influence: Towards the next frontiers. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 20(4), Article 2. http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/20/4/2.html

Henderson, L., & Gebharter, A. (2021). The role of source reliability in belief polarisation, Synthese, 199(3), 10253–10276.