IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/jriskr/v23y2020i12p1577-1589.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The climate change beliefs fallacy: the influence of climate change beliefs on the perceived consequences of climate change

Author

Listed:
  • Gea Hoogendoorn
  • Bernadette Sütterlin
  • Michael Siegrist

Abstract

Despite scientific agreement about the anthropogenic cause of climate change, the general public holds different beliefs regarding the causes of climate change. Some believe climate change to be caused by natural processes, while others believe it to be caused by human activities. People’s beliefs regarding the causes of climate change drive both their risk perception and their mitigation behavior, and such beliefs are not easy to alter. Therefore, it is crucial to understand how these beliefs shape people’s perception of the consequences of climate change. We find that beliefs regarding the causes of climate change can lead to different perceptions of the possible consequences of climate change. People who believed climate change to be caused by human activities rather than by natural processes perceived the consequences of the 2017 hurricanes to be worse, as well as to cause more suffering, than people who believed climate change to be caused by natural processes. These results suggest a fallacy, since the suffering of people and animals affected by hurricanes does not depend on the causes of those hurricanes, but rather on the damage that is caused. With regard to communication, it is important to link the currently observable events possible caused by climate change to human behavior, since doing so may increase people’s awareness of the severity of the consequences of anthropogenic climate change and, thus, possibly also their willingness to engage in mitigation behavior and prevention measures.

Suggested Citation

  • Gea Hoogendoorn & Bernadette Sütterlin & Michael Siegrist, 2020. "The climate change beliefs fallacy: the influence of climate change beliefs on the perceived consequences of climate change," Journal of Risk Research, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 23(12), pages 1577-1589, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:jriskr:v:23:y:2020:i:12:p:1577-1589
    DOI: 10.1080/13669877.2020.1749114
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13669877.2020.1749114
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/13669877.2020.1749114?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Diekert, Florian & Goeschl, Timo & König-Kersting, Christian, 2024. "The Behavioral Economics of Extreme Event Attribution," Working Papers 0741, University of Heidelberg, Department of Economics.
    2. Michael Siegrist & Joseph Árvai, 2020. "Risk Perception: Reflections on 40 Years of Research," Risk Analysis, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 40(S1), pages 2191-2206, November.
    3. Oana Georgiana SECUIAN & Anamaria Gabriela VLAD & Mihaela VLAD, 2021. "Smart city a solution for dealing with climate change in European cities," Smart Cities International Conference (SCIC) Proceedings, Smart-EDU Hub, vol. 9, pages 285-296, November.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:jriskr:v:23:y:2020:i:12:p:1577-1589. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RJRR20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.