What counts as an “environmental” issue? Differences in issue conceptualization by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status

Song, Hwanseok; Lewis, Neil A.; Ballew, Matthew T.; Bravo, Mario; Davydova, Julie; Gao, H. Oliver; Garcia, Robert K.; Hiltner, Sofia; Naiman, Sarah M.; Pearson, Adam R.; Romero‐Canyas, Rainer; Schuldt, Jonathon P.

doi:10.1016/j.jenvp.2020.101404

Cited by 59 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…Our findings do not provide any details about what aspects or impacts of climate change people worry about, and whether this differs within or across countries. Previous research has shown that group membership can influence perceptions of environmental issues ( Song et al, 2020 ) and it is likely that left-leaning and right-leaning individuals may worry about different threats. Further, the data provide no insights into how individuals prioritize the issue of climate change compared to other societal issues.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Political Orientation Moderates the Relationship Between Climate Change Beliefs and Worry About Climate Change

et al. 2020

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Public perceptions are well established as a key factor in support for climate change mitigation policies, and they tend to vary both within and between countries. Based on data from the European Social Survey Round 8 (N = 44,387), we examined the role of climate change beliefs and political orientation in explaining worry about climate change across 23 countries. We show that belief in anthropogenic climate change, followed by expectations of negative impacts from climate change, are the strongest predictors of worry about climate change. While the strength of the association between political orientation and worry about climate change varies across countries, self-positioning further to the right of the political spectrum is associated with lower levels of worry in most of the countries included in the analysis. We further show that political orientation moderates the relationship between climate change beliefs and worry. While increased confidence in the anthropogenic nature of climate change and expectations of negative impacts are both associated with increased worry across the political spectrum, the relationship is weaker among right-leaning as compared to left-leaning individuals. Notably, the main effect of political orientation on worry about climate change is no longer statistically significant when the interaction terms are present. Finally, a relatively small amount of the explained variance in worry is attributable to differences between countries. The findings might inform strategies for climate change communication in a European context.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Political Orientation Moderates the Relationship Between Climate Change Beliefs and Worry About Climate Change

et al. 2020

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“…More interestingly, our approach can be used to illuminate belief system dynamics in groups who cluster attitudes in different ways. For example, recent work shows that Black Americans see human-oriented issues (e.g., unemployment, lack of access to grocery stores) as environmental issues more so than White Americans (Song et al, 2020). This difference may play out in different belief system dynamics in these groups, especially the interplay between nodes representing environmental and human-oriented issues.…”

Section: What Are Plausible Uses and Extensions?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluating Belief System Networks as a Theory of Political Belief System Dynamics

Brandt

Sleegers

2021

Pers Soc Psychol Rev

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A theory of political belief system dynamics should incorporate causal connections between elements of the belief system and the possibility that belief systems are influenced by exogenous factors. These necessary components can be satisfied by conceptualizing an individual’s belief system as a network of causally connected attitudes and identities which, via the interactions between the elements and the push of exogenous influences, produces the disparate phenomena in the belief systems literature. We implement this belief systems as networks theory in a dynamic Ising model and demonstrate that the theory can integrate at least six otherwise unrelated phenomenon in the political belief systems literature, including work on attitude consistency, cross-pressures, spillover effects, partisan cues, and ideological differences in attitude consensus. Our findings suggest that belief systems are not just one thing, but emerge from the interactions between the attitudes and identities in the belief system. All code is available: https://osf.io/aswy8/?view_only=99aff77909094bddabb5d382f6db2622 .

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“…Indeed, there is considerable evidence to suggest that the psychology of English-speaking White participants in Western countries does not generalize to the global majority (e.g., Majid et al, 2004;Heinrich et. al., 2010;Song et al, 2020;Tropp & Wright, 2003). As just one example, people in the United States are unusually and extremely individualistic relative to people in the rest of the world (Heinrich et al, 2010), and this unusual individualism is particularly characteristic of White Americans (Vandello & Cohen, 1999).…”

Section: History and Defaults In Social Cognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Methods for Advancing an Open, Replicable, and Inclusive Science of Social Cognition

Ledgerwood¹,

Frost²,

Kadirvel³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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This chapter is divided into three sections. In the first section, we describe concrete practices that researchers can use to calibrate their confidence in a significant finding to the actual strength of evidence provided by that finding. In the second section, we discuss how researchers can calibrate the scope of the conclusions they draw from a study to the stimuli and participants sampled in that study. In the third section, we highlight the importance of approaching scientific inquiry from diverse vantage points, and provide specific recommendations for enhancing diversity and inclusion in social cognition research. Together, these three sections offer researchers a roadmap for enhancing what we learn from the work that we do.

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What counts as an “environmental” issue? Differences in issue conceptualization by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status

Cited by 59 publications

References 26 publications

Political Orientation Moderates the Relationship Between Climate Change Beliefs and Worry About Climate Change

Political Orientation Moderates the Relationship Between Climate Change Beliefs and Worry About Climate Change

Evaluating Belief System Networks as a Theory of Political Belief System Dynamics

Methods for Advancing an Open, Replicable, and Inclusive Science of Social Cognition

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