This paper examines how measures of both explicit and implicit attitudes to the environment relate to unconscious patterns of eye movements t owards or away from iconic images of environmental damage and climate change. It found that those with a strong positive implicit attitude towards low carbon products spent significantly more time attending to negative images of climate change than positive images of nature in a ten second interval, and this occurred even in the first 200 milliseconds of looking. Those with a strong positive implicit attitude towards low carbon products also spent significantly more time attending to negative images of climate change in the first 200 milliseconds compared to those with a weaker implicit attitude. Measures of explicit attitude did not predict eye gaze towards the negative images in this way. In other words, there is a statistical association between implicit attitude (rather than explicit attitude) and how people focus their attention on iconic images of environmental damage and climate change. The study discusses the implication of this empirical finding for those attempting to mobilize consumers in the fight against climate change.

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Consumers clearly have a role to play in the global fight against climate change since even relatively small changes in patterns of household consumption could significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But what evidence is there that consumers do consider the environmental impacts of products when shopping? Indeed, how psychologically salient are the carbon footprint labels now appearing on a range of products in various countries?Here we test the psychological salience of this information using eye-tracking to identify, on a frame-by-frame basis, individual fixations on various features of the packaging, including carbon footprint. We found that the mean fixation level for carbon footprint was 12.2%, indicating it was indeed as salient as other important features. High or low levels of carbon footprint had no significant 2 effect on gaze fixation. We also found no significant relationship between selfreported attitudes to low carbon products and overall level of fixation, nor was there any significant relationship between implicit attitude and level of fixation.But implicit attitude did significantly impact on the point of first fixation, in that those with a strong positive implicit attitude were significantly more likely to fixate first on carbon footprint information. This suggests that carbon labelling could potentially be effective for some consumers, those with the right implicit attitude. Measures of explicit attitude, on the other hand, seemed to be largely irrelevant. The implications of this finding for sparking a 'green revolution' in consumer habits through the provision of carbon footprint information for consumers is discussed.

For more information, including our policy and submission procedure, please contact the Repository Team at: usir@salford.ac.uk. AbstractThere is considerable concern that the public are not getting the message about climate change. One possible explanation is 'optimism bias', where individuals overestimate the likelihood of positive events happening to them and underestimate the likelihood of negative events. Evidence from behavioural neuroscience suggest that this bias is underpinned by selective information processing, specifically through a reduced level of neural coding of undesirable information, and an unconscious tendency for optimists to avoid fixating negative information. Here we test how this bias in attention could relate to the processing of climate change messages. Using eye tracking, we found that level of dispositional optimism affected visual fixations on climate change messages. Optimists spent less time (overall dwell time) attending to any arguments about climate changes (either 'for' or 'against') with substantially shorter individual fixations on aspects of arguments for climate change, i.e. those that reflect the scientific consensus but are bad news. We also found that when asked to summarise what they had read, non-optimists were more likely to frame their recall in terms of the arguments 'for' climate change; optimists were significantly more likely to frame it in terms of a debate between two opposing positions. Those highest in dispositional optimism seemeed to have the strongest and most pronounced level of optimism bias when it came to estimating the probability of being personally affected by climate change. We discuss the importance of overcoming this cognitive bias to develop more effective strategies for communicating about climate change.