The Effects of Climatic Events on Expressed Climate Change Belief

• In Event: The Psychology of Climate Change

Abstract

Can environmental exposures change ingrained political preferences and beliefs about polarized issues? In this study, employing data comprised of millions of climate change related tweets from the United States collected between 2014 and 2017, we examine over 500,000 Twitter users' climate change discussions and revealed political beliefs and investigate whether exogenously shifting climatic conditions alter rates of expressed belief in climate change. Further, we explore whether -- within person over time -- exposure to more extreme meteorological conditions produces an increased likelihood of shifting from skeptical speech towards expressed belief in climate change. We use supervised machine learning techniques for the classification of the belief content of climate change speech and employ methods from the climate change impacts literature to examine the causal role of climatic conditions on shifting political beliefs. Ours is the first study that we are aware of to examine the 'local warming effect' within individuals over time.

Authors

• Nick Obradovich, MIT

• Jason Jeffrey Jones, University of California, San Diego

• Iyad Rahwan, Masdar Institute of Science and Technology