How Linking to Climate-related Disasters Shapes Environmental Policy Support

• In Event: Influence of Disasters on Public Policy

Abstract

A catastrophic event can make disasters more psychologically proximal people who experience it. Decreasing psychological distance (also described as salience (Taylor & Thompson, 1982)) increases the concreteness of events (Trope & Liberman, 2003, 2010) and might make people more willing to take action to prevent climate change, to take preventative measures towards natural disasters, or to lobby government for related public goods (Wibbenmeyer, Anderson, Plantinga 2018). However, people struggle in transferring learning from one domain to another (e.g., math formulas to word problems). Using an original survey of residents of a community that recently experienced a catastrophic event that was likely made worse by climate change, we ask whether do psychological proximity and drawing a mechanistic link from climate change to natural disasters interact to affect people's support for pro-environmental action and policy. We hypothesize that providing respondents with mechanistic explanations of the science that explains how climate change contributed to the factors - wildfire and intense rainfall - that likely caused the debris flows experienced by this community will bolster their appreciation of the urgency and scope of climate change problems. We hypothesize that reduced psychological distance will result in higher risk perceptions, greater demand for government action, and more pro-environmental action.

Author

• Sarah Anderson, University of California, Santa Barbara