Time Perspective, Climate Perception, and Environmental Behaviors

Many environmental issues, from climate change to resource depletion, can be framed as a social dilemma of individual decision-making, featuring a conflict between immediate self-interest and long-term collective interest.... [ view full abstract ]

Many environmental issues, from climate change to resource depletion, can be framed as a social dilemma of individual decision-making, featuring a conflict between immediate self-interest and long-term collective interest. While the dilemma has been extensively investigated in terms of prisoners’ dilemma to foster immediate cooperation for governing the commons, the temporal dimension of the dilemma is less explored. Existing empirical evidence, mostly in psychology, shows inconsistent results of how time perspective affects environmental attitudes and behaviors. With a consideration of alternative understanding and measurement of time perspectives, we test how differences in time perspective affect perceptions of climate change and attitudes toward policy options at both the national and individual levels.

At the national level, languages differ in the way that they encode time. Some languages, such as English, grammatically indicate future actions and events explicitly; others, such as Chinese, have no reference to future time. We test whether the presence of future time reference in languages affects perception of climate change across countries, based on the data from the Gallup World Poll. The results show that future time reference, which grammatically makes future events more disconnected, is associated with significantly lower level awareness of climate change. The correlation between future time reference and perceived level of risks from climate change, however, is statistically insignificant.

At the individual level, we test the association between future time orientation and perceived risks of and action for climate change among English speakers through the online survey platform Amazon Mechanical Turk. Future time orientation is measured by the Consideration of Future Consequences Scale including 12 items. The results show that individuals that tend to focus on the future, compared to those without such a focus, would perceive more risk that relates to their personal health but not other boarder categories of risk. These individuals are also more prone to climate actions that relate to their own mitigation efforts, but not broad policy support or environmental citizenship.

These results are consistent with the construal-level theory, in which temporal distance is interrelated with other psychological distance dimensions as well as the level of mental construal. Particularly, while those with future perspectives are more likely to have an environmentally friendly perception, this association diminishes when the environmental issue becomes more abstract. We further our research by testing the impacts of future time reference and future time orientation on the actual conservation of energy and resources.