Seeing what can(not) be seen: Confirmation bias, employment dynamics and climate change

Abstract

Psychologists among other behavioural scientists refer to the tendency of favouring, interpreting, and searching for information that supports one's prior beliefs as confirmation bias . Given the relevance of the topic to the field, we develop a small-scale agent-based model in discrete-time to investigate how employment conditions affect attitudes towards climate policies under such a cognitive bias. Our narrative resembles the so-called discrete-choice approach. It is assumed that the respective probability functions respond to variations in the employment rate. Persistent endogenous fluctuations might emerge via a super-critical Neimark-Sacker bifurcation. Furthermore, depending on the strength of agents' response to the collective opinion, we might have coexistence of periodic attractors as a representation of path dependence. In terms of policy implications, we highlight that the adoption of a successful green-agenda depends on the ability of policy-makers to take advantage of favourable conditions in the labour market while appealing to different framing strategies.

Climate Change Salience, Economic Insecurity, and Support for Mitigation Policies

“…Regarding policy conclusions, our results suggest that policy makers can reduce public opposition to climate change-related policies if proposed when macroeconomic conditions are good and if they can lessen the fears of vulnerable groups through positive economic messaging. 8 These conclusions align with those in Cafferata et al (2021).They develop an agent-based model to explore how employment conditions affect environmental attitudes under confirmation bias, and conclude that policy makers should act when employment is increasing and should emphasise the gains of climate change mitigation.…”

“…Our study also contributes to a separate strand of literature that analyses how economic factors influence attitudes towards climate change. This literature generally shows that worsening economic conditions are associated with less concern about the environment and that the success of green-agenda policies is likely to be higher under favourable economic conditions (Kahn and Kotchen 2011;Kachi et al, 2015;Scruggs and Benegal, 2012;Benegal, 2018;Cafferata et al, 2021). Most recently, Meyer (2022) analyses U.S. data and estimates that a one percentage point increase in the county-level unemployment rate reduces by 3-5 percentage points the likelihood that the survey respondent believes in and wants action on climate change.…”

Confirmation Bias as a Mechanism to Focus Attention Enhances Signal Detection

“…The already existing literature on computational models addressing confirmation bias shows a notable gap between highly abstract models (Pouget & Villeneuve 2012), and models that target very specific topics such as the financial market (Cafferata & Tramontana 2019), attitudes related to climate change policies (Cafferata et al 2021), or cyber-social networks (Mao et al 2020). Usually, abstract models implement very idealized agents and cannot encapsulate all aspects of specific scenarios, which are the subject of the latter models.…”

Cognitive Biases in Understanding the Influence of Shale Gas Exploitation: From Environmental and Economic Perspectives

“…In other words, people attempt to preserve their existing beliefs by focus on information that confirms those beliefs and discounting information that could challenge them. In terms of energy exploitation (Cafferata et al, 2021), people often believe that natural gas can produce less GHG compared with traditional energy and can better prevent environmental pollution (Wang et al, 2021). As a result, people tend to have better expectations for the exploitation of shale gas.…”