Discrepant implicit and explicit attitudes toward climate change: implications for climate change communications

Abstract

In order to better engage individuals in the progress of carbon neutrality, public attitude toward the issue of climate change is a fundamental question. In recent decades, burgeoning research has implied the distinctive effect of implicit attitude on behaviors from explicit attitude. However, the majority of research on attitudes toward climate change has focused on explicit attitude. This research fills this gap by exploring individuals’ implicit attitudes toward climate change in two aspects—overall evaluation (positive or negative) and attribution of (anthropogenic or natural progress) climate change, which are among the most concerned dimensions in the study of individuals’ attitudes toward climate change, and we compared implicit attitudes with explicit attitudes in these two dimensions. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) and its modification, the Single Category Implicit Association Test (SC-IAT), were applied to measure implicit attitudes. Our results show that participants implicitly think of climate change as human-induced, corresponding with explicit attitudes; however, they express indifference to climate change as manifested by neutral implicit evaluation, contrary to the negative evaluation in the explicit attitude test. This indifferent implicit attitude should inspire policymakers to focus not only on regular knowledge communication but also on an emotional and personal way to induce true concern for climate change amongst the public.