Psychological responses to proximal climate change

A frequent suggestion to increase individuals’ willingness to take action on climate change and to support relevant policies is to highlight its spatially proximal consequences. Although often not explicitly stated, the... [ view full abstract ]

A frequent suggestion to increase individuals’ willingness to take action on climate change and to support relevant policies is to highlight its spatially proximal consequences. Although often not explicitly stated, the rationale behind proximising climate change seems to be that this approach decreases the psychological distance between the issue and individuals who could or should act and makes the consequences of climate change more personally relevant. Moreover, proximising climate change is believed to increase (emotional) concern and the feeling of being personally at risk; ultimately, these processes are expected to enhance people’s motivation to act. Despite the common sense appeal of proximising and the frequent propositions to use this strategy to motivate action against climate change, available research has not revealed the assumed supremacy of proximised climate change communication over communication with a more distal focus.
To better understand the psychological processes that occur as people think about spatially proximal versus spatially distant consequences of climate change and to explore possible explanations as to why proximising has fallen short of its potential to engage people with climate change in previous research, we conducted 32 qualitative interviews with members from the general public in Switzerland. Half of the interviewees read a text that described climate change with a proximal (i.e., national) focus, while the other half read a text that had a distant focus (i.e., global).
One of the main findings of the interviews and a possible explanation as to why previous studies did not find the expected differences between proximal and distant framings of climate change is that interviewees do often not stick to the spatial focus that they have been exposed to. Instead, interviewees spontaneously switched between talking about consequences that were spatially close and distant. These mental transpositions are mainly driven by the saliency of specific consequences and personal experiences.
We also find that proximising the consequences of climate change can alter their quality. For example, many interviewees have positive associations with the prospect of warmer summers where they live but do perceive temperature increases in other places as problematic.
In conclusion, the effects and effectiveness of framing climate change as a spatially proximal issue strongly depend on the recipients’ associations, experiences, beliefs, and values. Using this strategy is therefore unlikely to generally increase people’s engagement with climate change.