CLIMATE RISK PERCEPTIONS AND BEHAVIORAL INTENT RELATED TO CLIMATE CHANGE AND ECONOMIC COST

Individuals are faced with decisions about taking actions based on their own risk perceptions of climate change and its impacts. Which decision outcomes they select and the resulting behaviors will yield impacts on atmospheric carbon emissions and Earth’s climate. We examined the perceived risk and behavioral intention of the public as they responded to a proposed climate change scenario when the following factors were manipulated: time differentiation, source credibility, and perceived economic cost. Because we manipulated one variable at a time, the total number of scenario versions generated was eight (2x2x2). Three hundred and thirty participants from the public and 75 geoscience experts responded to one of the eight versions of the scenario. The scenario designed for this investigation required the respondent to decide what the scenario character should do and what the respondent would do given a set of experimentally manipulated conditions (behavioral intention). A set of Likert-type questions that measured how the scenario character and others would feel about the decision (perceived psychological risk and social risk) to take action were included. Respondents were asked general demographics questions, including age, gender, ethnicity, political affiliation, and education level. Result show that the factor that played the greatest role among the public and experts alike was the perceived economic cost where statistical significant differences were noted (p<0.05) in the decision to take action between the low cost (M=4.62) and the high cost (M=3.36) choice. Further differences (p<0.05) were observed in 3 of the 4 psychological and social risk questions. Analysis of the influence of political affiliation showed significant differences (p<0.05) where Republicans tended towards greater perceived social perceptions threats resulting from a high-cost climate change decision than Democrats. Thematic analysis of open-ended responses showed that responses could be grouped into categories related to: ethics, collective vs individual actions, economics, overall environmental benefits, or the need for more information and education in order to make a decision. The outcomes can serve to assist climate communicators as they frame messages about potential climate change actions to various audiences.