Overview

Undertake systematic and rigorous projects to test the impact of environmental communications in all media (e.g., advertising, documentary, feature film) on civic engagement, public opinion and persuasive outcomes. Use these to inform new creative work on multi-media climate change communications.

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News

Yale/Sea Studios Initiative. As part of the follow-up to the Conference, the Environmental Attitudes & Behavior Project at Yale’s Center on Environmental Law & Policy is exploring the creation of a joint initiative with the Sea Studios Foundation to develop and apply social science findings about attitude formation and change on climate change to the next phase of Sea Studios’ acclaimed Strange Days on Planet Earth television series and multi-media communications effort, which was done in collaboration with National Geographic. Planning is underway and will likely include survey work, psychology experiments and the convening of public dialogues. Several of the scholars who attended the Conference are likely to be involved.

Objectives

  • Applied social science needed.There is a shortfall in the application of social science methods to the understanding of the public’s opinions on climate change. A variety of disciplines – including psychology, linguistics, communications and political science – have developed robust insights into the process of attitude formation, persistence, and change.While the small subfield of environmental psychology has advanced in recent years, the amount and quality of work on climate change particularly is extraordinarily limited in comparison to its intellectual and practical significance. Accordingly, more social science research is needed on public attitudes and behavior regarding climate change.
  • Experimental subjects and data available.A ready subject for analysis awaits in the form of many fictional and non-fictional creative works dedicated to increasing public understanding of environmental issues, and climate change in particular. Some of these have included baseline and post-hoc audience evaluations and could offer available data for analysis. What influence have these creative works had on the public (both at large and by segment) as they have been disseminated? This influence should be evaluated both in laboratory settings and in field studies.
  • One page narrative.Given the overload of scientific information about climate change, there is a need for a concise one-page, single spaced narrative about climate change that provides a compelling call to civic engagement. It should specify concisely and arrestingly what has happened and what might happen as a result of climate change, and provide solutions for what can be done. The issue should be presented in a way that draws on the cognitive psychological work on framing, and other disciplinary findings. It should be made so compelling that it would disseminate itself through email forwarding.

Related Initiatives

  • Cultural Cognition Project/ Yale Law School - The Cultural Cognition Project is a group of scholars from Yale and other universities interested in studying how cultural values shape the public’s risk perceptions and related policy beliefs. Cultural cognition refers to the tendency of individuals to conform their beliefs about disputed matters of fact (e.g., whether global warming is a serious threat; whether the death penalty deters murder; whether gun control makes society more safe or less) to values that define their cultural identities. Project members are using the methods of various disciplines — including social psychology, anthropology, communications, and political science — to chart the impact of this phenomenon and to identify the mechanisms through which it operates. The Project also has an explicit normative objective: to identify processes of democratic decisionmaking by which society can resolve culturally grounded differences in belief in a manner that is both congenial to persons of diverse cultural outlooks and consistent with sound public policymaking.
  • Yale F&ES Law and Policy Center Environmental Attitudes and Behavior Project - Sixty percent of Americans think U.S. environmental quality is fair or poor and nearly as many are convinced that the environment is growing worse, according to multiple 2004 polls. While just under half of Americans view themselves as environmentalists and even greater numbers support environmental goals, this affinity and concern is not often translated into personal action or voting behavior. The Environmental Attitudes and Behavior (EAB) Project strives to address this discrepancy between Americans’ environmental values and subsequent personal and political decision-making.

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