Resource Type: Social Science Research

Interventions designed to encourage a particular pro-environmental behavior may have unintended consequences on other behaviors. These so-called “spillover” effects can be positive (for example, when increasing water conservation behaviors also leads to increased energy conservation behaviors) but advocates may also be concerned that they will be negative (for example, when enrolling in a green power program gives people moral license to consume more energy overall). While research on spillover effects is in its early stages, there are few signs to be concerned. On average, spillover effects on other behaviors are negative, but they are also negligibly small. However, keep in mind that most of these studies were conducted in the lab. Looking at the few studies in the field on spillover effects in real world behavior, there are more positive effects.             

Discussion on climate change on Twitter is clearly politically polarized. Studying 6.8 million tweets that mentioned “fake news” and “global warming” or “climate change”, the majority of tweets focus on the United States context. The anti-Democratic online community was more active on Twitter than the anti-conservative or anti-Republican community. More than half the examined most retweeted posts contained claims about climate change being a natural cycle or even denying it exists, while about a third of these tweets stated that climate change was human-caused. This study argues that fake news as a term has a hollow meaning, as it is used as a buzzword to discredit opponents and further the political agenda of different parties not only in the United States but also in other Western countries like Australia.

Maps, moving pictures, and photos have been shown to have powerful impacts on public opinion, even though public opinion on climate change is polarized along party lines in the U.S. Studies have found that images have a greater impact if they portray the local effects of sea-level rise and climate change on audiences in specific places (e.g., Boston, Miami), as opposed to its effects on exotic animals or locations such as polar bears at the North Pole. People surveyed report increased beliefs that climate change will cause negative results, concern for coastal communities and even belief that global warming is occurring. However, other studies have found that showing people images or maps of negative climate impacts on their own property or neighborhood may backfire, resulting in less concern, possibly because people defensively believe they made good individual decisions to purchase their property in the past. Realtor organizations have begun utilizing flood risk information in home listings, but the effects of this on homebuyer behavior are yet unknown.

Youth in Australia who are most worried about climate change are also most engaged with news and politics. Those most worried about climate also experience the most depression. This resource studied Australian youth from ages 10 to 19. Consistently, the youth who experience most worry about climate also follow the news most and also report more depressive symptoms. However, those who developed more climate worry as they aged did not experience more depressive symptoms than those who were moderately worried about climate, on average. Further, higher levels of these Australian youth experienced some level of worry (moderate, 25%, or increasing, 24%) than those experiencing low (17%) or decreasing (13%) levels of worry. 13% experienced persistently high levels of worry.