Pluralist Ignorance about Climate Change Attitudes : Mapping attitudinal misperception and second-order beliefs' associations with outcomes

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines pluralistic ignorance in the context of climate change across eleven countries. Pluralistic ignorance refers to a state of systematic inaccurate perception (misperception) of the distribution of attitudes in a reference group. In the climate domain, such misperceptions may matter because individuals do not only hold attitudes about climate change, but also beliefs about how widely these attitudes are shared by others. This thesis pursues three aims, using a survey of eleven countries (N = 3,653, n ≈ 330 per country). First, I map the prevalence of misperception regarding others’ climate beliefs, policy priority support, and willingness to make lifestyle changes to reduce climate change, using perceived–actual discrepancy measures. Second, I examine whether second-order beliefs, irrespective of their accuracy, regarding the attitudes above are independently associated with first-order attitudes (the individual’s own attitudes), and whether these associations vary across respondent categories. Third, I assess whether the discrepancy and regression analyses yield substantively convergent conclusions. The analyses produce country-level discrepancy estimates and regression models with country fixed effects. The results show substantial misperception across all three domains, in the direction of underestimating belief in human-caused climate change, support for political prioritization of climate change, and willingness to make lifestyle changes. Second-order beliefs are found to be positively associated with policy priority support, willingness to make lifestyle changes, and perceived collective efficacy in combating climate change, while exhibiting no statistically significant association with willingness to express views. These associations vary systematically across respondent categories, most consistently by age but also by sex and left-right political orientation. The analytical approaches converge in suggesting that pluralistic ignorance about climate change attitudes is widespread and consequential.