Audience: Conservatives & Republicans

Use emotionally positive images of climate change solutions to grab people’s attention. Using experiments with undergraduate students that measure individuals’ reaction time, researchers found that positive images of climate change, like windmills and solar panels, were better at grabbing participants’ attention than negative images of causes (smokestacks, air pollution) and effects (glaciers melting) of climate change. In fact, using negative images of climate change was no more attention grabbing than images irrelevant to climate change. The use of positive images may be even more important for grabbing the attention of those who are least disposed to care about the environment and climate change. So, when developing media and communication information, consider using positive images of climate change solutions.             

While partisanship remains the predominant dividing line in many views of climate and the environment, there are meaningful differences within party coalitions. Republicans and Republican leaners who describe their political views as moderate or liberal (roughly a third of all Republicans and leaners) are much more likely than conservative Republicans to see local impacts of climate change, support policies to address it and say the federal government is doing too little in areas of environmental protection. Further, younger generations and women in the GOP tend to be more critical of government action on the environment than their older and male counterparts. Republican women also are more supportive of polices aimed at reducing the impacts of climate change than GOP men.             

To engage conservatives with climate information, use credible, non-partisan sources, clear graphics, and motivate them to accurately learn. This study found conservatives were able to accurately process climate information in graph-form, and they were persuaded if a non-political context could be maintained. For liberals, presenting climate information from Obama was more persuasive than from a NASA source. Without a graph, there was no difference between these messengers for conservatives.