The emotions that citizens feel regarding changing the climate are associated with the climate action measures they are willing to support, suggests a study published this Wednesday in the scientific journal PLOS Climate. The results of this work can help, according to the authors, to design more effective environmental campaigns, with the appropriate emotional tone.
“People’s emotional reactions to climate change are related to their political preference to respond to this challenge: those who feel most guilty opt for policies that require personal sacrifices [como o aumento do preço da gasolina]those who have more hope prefer to invest in proactive solutions, such as renewable energy. Those who are afraid want greater regulation – of the fossil fuelsfor example”, explains to PÚBLICO Teresa A. Myers, first author of the study.
The authors focused on five different types of emotions commonly associated with climate change: guilt, anger, hope, sadness and fear. Using existing responses from a representative survey of the North American population, researchers were able to extract data relating not only to citizens’ emotional responses, but also to climate policy preferences.
Entitled Climate Change in the American Mind (climate change in American thought, in a free translation), the survey in question involved 16,605 participants and was carried out every six months, between 2010 and 2022, by the market research company Ipsos. The questionnaires included questions such as: “How intensely do you feel each of the following emotions when you think about global warming?”.
The results indicate that guilt and anger are more strongly associated with support for expensive policies (taxes on fuel prices). Hope and sadness are more linked to proactive policies, such as investment in infrastructure that prevents greenhouse gas emissions. greenhouse effect.
“I think this research can help those creating climate campaigns by allowing them to see which emotional tone is likely most associated with the desired policies. Thus, if a campaign is built around fear, this emotional tone will be more associated with support for regulation, when in fact the intention of the campaign was to increase support for renewable energy”, explains Teresa A. Myers, in a response by email.
“Fear, although more strongly associated with support for regulatory policies (emissions regulation, for example) compared to other types of policies, was more strongly associated with all types of political support compared to other emotions”, he adds a press release from PLOS Climate.
The author confesses that she was surprised that anger was more strongly related to support for policies that involve personal or financial sacrifice, rather than tighter regulation.
“This finding may be due to the fact that we don’t know exactly why people were angry. Some participants might be angry with scientists who claim climate change is here, for example. But I thought that, in theory, the argument that anger would lead to support for regulation was quite strong”, confesses the researcher.
Limited spectrum of emotions
The article lists different limitations, which is why the authors emphasize the need for more studies to establish this relationship between emotional responses and climate policies. The sample studied is also only representative of the North American population, so the results cannot be extrapolated to countries like Portugal, for example.
“Emotional reactions certainly have cultural implications; other studies have concluded that emotional reactions to climate change differ from country to country — both in terms of the total amount of emotional reactions and the types of emotions reported”, highlights the author.
Another limitation is the fact that human emotions unfold across a vast spectrum, not being limited to just five emotional responses. “The challenges are multiple. One is that people can have a number of different emotional reactions to climate change — the five we’ve included, but also others like compassion, pride, responsibility and solidarity. It is a challenge to study many different reactions at the same time, so it is difficult to obtain a complete emotional picture”, recognizes Teresa A. Myers.
