Epistemic Cognition: The Role of Uncertainty in Youth's Climate Change Behavior

• In Event: 67.019 - Investigating Epistemic Cognition in Relation to Food, Water, and Energy Issues

Abstract

Epistemic cognition refers to the epistemic beliefs that individual’s hold regarding the nature of knowledge and knowing; one dimension of epistemic cognition is the certainty of knowledge (Sinatra, Kienhues & Hofer, 2014). Although uncertainty is an inherent aspect of scientific study, “within the climate change discourse it functions as an obstacle to action” (Hayden, 2011, p. 118). Experimental research has shown that perception of high uncertainty has been correlated to reduced willingness to take pro-environmental behavior (Bamberg & Möser 2007; de Kwaadsteniet, van Dijk, Wit, De Cremer & de Rooij, 2007; Fortner et al., 2000). Malka and colleagues (2009) found that when skeptical language was introduced into a scientific message about climate change, it not only resulted in less favor for public policy to mitigate and adapt, it also resulted in a decreased belief that climate change was happening, and a decreased belief of the scientific consensus. In fact, perception of scientific consensus may be more predictive of concern and action than other factors (Ding, Maibach, Zhao, Roser-Renouf, & Leiserowitz, 2011; McCright, Dunlap, & Xiao, 2013).
School science textbooks are framing climate change as uncertain, even within the scientific community. In a linguistic analysis of four California 6th grade science textbooks, Román & Busch (2016) found the use of indeterminate quantifiers and modifying verbs to be common within the section on climate change. This paper reports on a follow-up study to test the effect of reading such a text on students’ knowledge, certainty, emotion, efficacy, social norms, and pro-environmental behavior, specific to climate change.
The research questions investigated in this study were: 1) How does the framing of uncertainty influence how students come to understand climate change? 2) How do knowledge, certainty, efficacy, and social norms relate to students’ pro-environmental behaviors? The experiment involved a pre-post survey, with the treatment being the presentation of a text, framing climate change with either high uncertainty (excerpted directly from a science textbook) or low uncertainty (a modified version of the excerpt). The experiment was conducted with 453 middle and high school students from five schools within the Bay Area. The schools were a mixture of private, public, and public charter.
The results of the experiment showed that while the text portraying climate change with high uncertainty did affect student’s own certainty and their perception of scientists’ certainty, it did not affect behavioral intention. Through regression analysis, it was found that efficacy and social norms were found to be direct determinants of pro-environmental behaviors for the issue of climate change for the youth in this study. The cognitive variables – knowledge and certainty – and the psychological variable – emotion – were not significant predictors of pro-environmental behavior.
The implications for this study are that 1) students’ appraisal of uncertainty was correlated to their interaction with authoritative text’s framing of uncertainty and 2) if action-taking is an intended outcome of climate change education efforts, then the learning activities should include components to address efficacy and social norms.

Author

• K.C. Busch, North Carolina State University