by Ljubica Chatman

Climate change is a pressing issue facing humanity today and activists claim that: “To change everything we need everyone.” However, polls report a deep divide between liberals and conservatives, with liberal Americans promoting actions to mitigate climate change and conservatives showing more opposition. These findings often implicitly vilify conservatives, with some prominent conservatives providing probable cause.

A deeper look at environmental attitudes through a series of studies by Feinberg and Willer (2013) reveals the reasons for this divide. Namely, liberals tend to view climate change as a moral issue, a matter of right or wrong, amplifying their engagement. This occurs because the rhetoric on environmental issues is framed so as to appeal to moral foundations central to liberals: protecting and caring for the environment. In contrast, the values that are more central to conservatives, like sanctity and purity, were scarce in the discourse surrounding environmental issues.

For instance, when reading about a day in the life of a person, liberals judged the person who didn’t recycle as less moral compared to the person who did, whereas recycling did not make a difference in how conservatives perceived the person’s moral value. Similarly, liberals’ explanations of why they would or would not support behaving in environmentally friendly ways tended to involve more opinions of what is moral or ethical.

However, when researchers emphasized purity and “how polluted and contaminated the environment has become and how important it is for people to clean and purify [it],” this framing elicited feelings of disgust associated with morality, amplifying conservatives’ pro-environmental attitudes. Moreover, for conservatives this message elicited greater support for pro-environmental legislation and greater belief in global warming, thus significantly decreasing or eliminating the divide.

This research suggests that if we indeed need everyone to change everything, we should reconsider the way we communicate about climate change with the fundamental values of both parties in mind.

 
Reference:
Feinberg, M. & Willer, R. (2013) The moral roots of environmental attitudes. Psychological Science, 24, 1, 56-62
Recommended reading:
Graham, J., Heidt, J. & Nosek, B. A. (2009) Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96, 5, 1029–1046
Feygina, I., Jost, J. & Goldsmith, R. E. (2010) System justification, the denial of global warming and the possibility of “system-sanctioned change”. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36, 326-338