Ideologies, Conspiracy Beliefs, and the Chinese Public’s Politicized Attitudes to Climate Change

Abstract

While ideologies consistently influence public opinions on climate change in Western democracies, whether they affect the Chinese public’s climate attitudes is unknown. By applying a well-established measure of Chinese ideology, this study conducted a nationwide survey (n = 1469) on the relationships between climate attitudes and ideologies, conspiracy beliefs, and science literacy. It is the first study to empirically investigate the impact of ideological tendencies, conspiracy beliefs, and conspiratorial thinking in shaping people’s climate attitudes. Among a series of novel findings, ideology was found to be a crucial factor in Chinese attitudes toward climate change, and economic ideology, in particular, was most strongly related to climate attitude. Moreover, somewhat counterintuitively, we found a positive link between respondents’ conspiratorial thinking and their climate awareness, as well as the failure of the moderation role of science literacy on ideological factors that influence climate attitude. All these findings suggest a mechanism behind the Chinese public’s perception of climate change, primarily working on the individual–state relationship.

Semantic and Causal Relations Between the Conspiracy Mentality and Belief in Conspiracy Theories

“…A meta-analysis of zero-order correlations has shown conspiracy mentality to be less strongly related to low cognitive ability (r = .20 for the BCTI, r = .09 for the CMQ; Stasielowicz, 2022). Furthermore, Pan et al (2023) observed that climate change denial was positively related to belief in conspiracy theories but negatively related to endorsement of conspiracy mentality statements. Taken together, these findings suggest that the greater empirical riskiness of belief in conspiracy theories causes it to differ functionally from the conspiracy mentality, even if these differences are generally subtle.…”

Conspiracy Mentality Versus Belief in Conspiracy Theories

“…This would allow empirical exploration of the hypothesis that the latter distrust might be a heuristic aid to democratic processes by encouraging people to be suspicious of what powerful interests are doing and what they are being told (e.g., Briggs, 2004;Enders & Smallpage, 2018;Huntington, 1983;Sobo, 2021). Some promising divergences between the CMQ and measures such as the BCTI are indeed already being observed in meta-analysis (Stasielowicz, 2022), and in the small number of studies that run them both at the same time using covariance analysis (e.g., Pan et al, 2023; for review, see Trella et al, 2024, this issue). Toward these aims, informed by Nera's (2024, this issue) critique and our elaboration, we recommend that researchers:…”