Public perceptions of climate tipping points

Coverage of climate tipping points has rapidly increased over the past 20 years. Despite this upsurge, there has been precious little research into how the public perceives these abrupt and/or irreversible large-scale risks. This article provides a nationally representative view on public perceptions of climate tipping points and possible societal responses to them (n = 1773). Developing a mixed-methods survey with cultural cognition theory, it shows that awareness among the British public is low. The public is doubtful about the future effectiveness of humanity's response to climate change in general, and significantly more doubtful about its response to tipping points specifically. Significantly more people with an egalitarian worldview judge tipping points likely to be crossed and to be a significant threat to humanity. All possible societal responses received strong support. The article ends by considering the prospects for 'cultural tipping elements' to tip support for climate policies across divergent cultural worldviews.

The Language of Pandemic Leaderships: Mapping Political Rhetoric During the COVID-19 Outbreak

This article maps political rhetoric by national leaders during the COVID-19 pandemic. We identify and characterize global variations in major rhetorical storylines invoked in publicly available speeches (N = 1201) across a sample of 26 countries. Employing a text analytics or corpus linguistics approach, we show that state heads rhetorically lead their nations by: enforcing systemic interventions, upholding global unity, encouraging communal cooperation, stoking national fervor, and assuring responsive governance. Principal component analysis further shows that country-level rhetoric is organized along emergent dimensions of cultural cognition: an agency-structure axis to define the loci of pandemic interventions and a hierarchy-egalitarianism axis which distinguishes top-down enforcement from bottom-up calls for cooperation. Furthermore, we detect a striking contrast between countries featuring populist versus cosmopolitan rhetoric, which diverged in terms of their collective meaning making around leading over versus leading with, as well as their experienced pandemic severity. We conclude with implications for understanding global pandemic leadership in an unequal world and the contributions of mixed-methods approaches to a generative political psychology in times of crisis.

Six minutes to promote change: People, not facts, alter students' perceptions on climate change

Anthropogenic climate change threatens the structure and function of ecosystems throughout the globe, but many people are still skeptical of its existence. Traditional "knowledge deficit model" thinking has suggested that providing the public with more facts about climate change will assuage skepticism. However, presenting evidence contrary to prior beliefs can have the opposite effect and result in a strengthening of previously held beliefs, a phenomenon known as biased assimilation or a backfire effect. Given this, strategies for effectively communicating about socioscientific issues that are politically controversial need to be thoroughly investigated. We randomly assigned 184 undergraduates from an environmental science class to one of three experimental conditions in which we exposed them to short videos that employed different messaging strategies: (a) an engaging science lecture, (b) consensus messaging, and (c) elite cues. We measured changes in student perceptions of climate change across five constructs (content knowledge, acceptance of scientific consensus, perceived risk, support for action, and climate identity) before and after viewing videos. Consensus messaging outperformed the other two conditions in increasing student acceptance of the scientific consensus, perceived risk of climate change, and climate identity, suggesting this may be an effective strategy for communicating the gravity of anthropogenic climate change. Elite cues outperformed the engaging science lecture condition in increasing student support for action on climate, with politically conservative students driving this relationship, suggesting that the messenger is more important than the message if changing opinions about the necessity of action on climate change is the desired outcome. Relative to the other conditions, the engaging science lecture did not support change in students' perceptions on climate, but appealing to student respect for authority produced positive results. Notably, we observed no decline in students' acceptance of climate science, indicating that none of the conditions induced a backfire effect.

Resolving the small-pockets problem helps clarify the role of education and political ideology in shaping vaccine scepticism

Understanding the factors associated with vaccine scepticism is challenging because of the 'small-pockets' problem: The number of highly vaccine-sceptical people is low, and small subsamples such as these can be missed using traditional regression approaches. To overcome this problem, the current study (N = 5,200) used latent profile analysis to uncover six profiles, including two micro-communities of vaccine-sceptical people who have the potential to jeopardize vaccine-led herd immunity. The most vaccine-sceptical group (1.14%) was highly educated and expressed strong liberal tendencies. This group was also the most sceptical about genetically modified crops and nuclear energy, and most likely to receive news about science from the Internet. The second-most vaccine-sceptical group (3.4%) was young, poorly educated, and politically extreme (both left and right). In resolving the small-pockets problem, the current analyses also help reconcile competing theoretical perspectives about the role of education and political ideology in shaping anti-vaccination views.

Climate change, cultural cognition, and media effects: Worldviews drive news selectivity, biased processing, and polarized attitudes

According to cultural cognition theory, individuals hold opinions about politically contested issues like climate change that are consistent with their "cultural way of life," conforming their opinions to how they think society should be organized and to what they perceive are the attitudes of their cultural peers. Yet despite dozens of cultural cognition studies, none have directly examined the role of the news media in facilitating these differential interpretations. To address this gap, drawing on a national survey of US adults administered in 2015, we statistically modeled the cultural cognition process in relation to news choices and media effects on public attitudes about climate change. Individuals possessing strongly held cultural worldviews, our findings show, not only choose news outlets where they expect to find culturally congruent arguments about climate change, but they also selectively process the arguments they encounter. Overall, our study demonstrates the substantial role that cultural cognition in combination with news media choices play in contributing to opinion polarization on climate change and other politicized science topics.

Expanding the Political Philosophy Dimension of the RISP Model: Examining the Conditional Indirect Effects of Cultural Cognition

This article attempts to connect literatures from the Risk Information Seeking and Processing (RISP) model and cultural cognition theory. We do this by assessing the relationship between the two prominent cultural cognition variables (i.e., group and grid) and risk perceptions. We then examine whether these risk perceptions are associated with three outcomes important to the RISP model: information seeking, systematic processing, and heuristic processing, through a serial mediation model. We used 2015 data collected from 10 communities across the United States to test our hypotheses. Our results show that people high on group and low on grid (egalitarian communitarians) show greater risk perceptions regarding water quality issues. Moreover, these higher levels of perceived risk translate into increased information seeking, systematic processing of information, and lower heuristic processing through intervening variables from the RISP model (e.g., negative emotions and information insufficiency). These results extend the extant literature by expanding on the treatment of political ideology within the RISP model literature and taking a more nuanced approach to political beliefs in accordance with the cultural cognitions literature. Our article also expands on the RISP literature by looking at information-processing variables.

Experimental priming of independent and interdependent activity does not affect culturally variable psychological processes

Cultural psychologists have shown that people from Western countries exhibit more independent self-construal and analytic (rule-based) cognition than people from East Asia, who exhibit more interdependent self-construal and holistic (relationship-based) cognition. One explanation for this cross-cultural variation is the ecocultural hypothesis, which links contemporary psychological differences to ancestral differences in subsistence and societal cohesion: Western thinking formed in response to solitary herding, which fostered independence, while East Asian thinking emerged in response to communal rice farming, which fostered interdependence. Here, we report two experiments that tested the ecocultural hypothesis in the laboratory. In both, participants played one of two tasks designed to recreate the key factors of working alone and working together. Before and after each task, participants completed psychological measures of independent-interdependent self-construal and analytic-holistic cognition. We found no convincing evidence that either solitary or collective tasks affected any of the measures in the predicted directions. This fails to support the ecocultural hypothesis. However, it may also be that our priming tasks are inappropriate or inadequate for simulating subsistence-related behavioural practices, or that these measures are fixed early in development and therefore not experimentally primable, despite many previous studies that have purported to find such priming effects.

Art and the brain: a view from dementia

OBJECTIVE

Art making encompasses a range of perceptual and cognitive functions involving widely distributed brain systems. The dementias impact on these systems in different ways, raising the possibility that each dementia has a unique artistic signature.

DESIGN

Here we use a review of the visual art of 14 artists with dementia (five Alzheimer's disease, seven fronto-temporal dementia and two dementia with Lewy bodies) to further our understanding of the neurobiological constituents of art production and higher artistic function.

RESULTS

Artists with Alzheimer's disease had prominent changes in spatial aspects of their art and attributes of colour and contrast. These qualities were preserved in the art of fronto-temporal dementia, which was characterised by perseverative themes and a shift towards realistic representation. The art of dementia with Lewy Bodies was characterised by simple, bizarre content.

CONCLUSIONS

The limitations of using visual aspects of individual artworks to infer the impact of dementia on art production are discussed with the need for a wider perspective encompassing changes in cognition, emotion, creativity and artistic personality. A novel classificatory scheme is presented to help characterise neural mechanisms of higher artistic functions in future studies.