The influence of causal knowledge on the willingness to change attitude towards climate change: results from an empirical study

ABSTRACT

Climate change is one of the significant global challenges currently facing humanity. Even though its seriousness seems to be common knowledge among the public, the reaction of individuals to it has been slow and uncertain. Many studies assert that simply knowing about climate change is not enough to generate people’s behavioural response. They claim, indeed, that in some cases scientific literacy can even obstruct behavioural response instead. However, recent surveys show a rather poor understanding of climate dynamics and argue that lack of knowledge about causal relationships within climate dynamics can hinder behavioural response, since the individual is not able to understand his/her role as causal agent and therefore doesn’t know how to take proper action. This study starts from the hypothesis that scientific knowledge focused on clarifying climate dynamics can make people understand not only dynamics themselves, but also their interactive relationship with the environment. Teaching materials on climate change based on such considerations were designed and implemented in a course for secondary-school students with the aim of investigating whether this kind of knowledge had an influence on students’ willingness to adopt pro-environmental behaviours. Questionnaires were delivered for testing the effect of the teaching experience on knowledge and behaviour.

KEYWORDS:

• Causal knowledge
• willingness to change behaviour
• climate change
• secondary-school students
• science education

Acknowledgements

The authors thank all the scholars involved in the study as analysts, consultants, and/or readers, particularly Olivia Levrini who also helped us in the data analysis, Justin Dillon who gave suggestions for improving the manuscript, and Victoria Clifford who revised the language.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Giulia Tasquier http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7558-494X

Francesca Pongiglione http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1744-0403

Notes

1 Many studies suggest that changing students’ attitude in socio-scientific issues such as climate change presents unique challenges. Our results, though, show that the level of awareness concerning climate change does not correlate to behavioural engagement (nor to a higher knowledge level). Respectively, 84% of Non-Volunteers and 93% of Volunteers declared themselves either ‘very sure’ or ‘quite sure’ about the existence of climate change. We therefore proceeded with our hypothesis that sometimes, students need more knowledge rather than a change in attitude.

2 In building the knowledge patterns, we observed that the ‘I don’t know’ responses usually correlated with more correct responses (when given) and a higher capacity in providing better arguments in some open questions. Students seemed to be more aware of the limits of their own knowledge, and, instead of guessing at the right answer, preferred to respond that they did not know. Therefore, we considered the ‘I don’t know’ response as slightly preferable to a wrong answer.