Vested Interest Theory as a Framework for Understanding Anthropogenic Climate Change Risk Perceptions

ABSTRACT

Climate change due to anthropogenic activities is contributing to the systematic warming of Earth. A warming planet represents an existential threat to humanity, contributing to the increased frequency and magnitude of multiple natural hazards. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) notes that time is running out to create meaningful change to avert climate-related consequences. This research posits Vested Interest Theory (VIT) as a potentially useful framework for assessing attitudes and risk perceptions associated with anthropogenic climate change (ACC). Vested Interest Theory mediates the attitude-behavior relationship where highly vested individuals are more likely to behave in attitudinally-consistent ways. Vestedness is conceptualized as five distinct and observable variables: salience, certainty, immediacy, self-efficacy, and response-efficacy. To test VIT’s efficacy in this context, a survey was conducted with participants crowdsourced from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform (N = 1053). Participants responded to items designed to measure their individual vestedness in ACC consequences, risk perceptions, and behavioral intentions. This initial investigation shows that VIT’s constituent variables predict consequential amounts of observed variance in critical variables including risk perception, perceived event severity, and behavioral intentions related to ACC hazard mitigation. The results support the use of VIT as a framework for understanding attitude-behavior relationships associated with ACC mitigation. Based on these findings, we argue that VIT can also serve as a valuable message design framework to motivate ACC-related mitigation actions.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge that this research was produced on the ancestral homelands of American Indian tribes that have inhabited the space for centuries, including the Akimel O’odham (Pima) and Pee Posh (Maricopa) peoples. We recognize that these sovereign peoples were forcibly removed from their land and we respect the many Indigenous peoples still connected to this land. We honor and thank the Indigenous ancestors of this place.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by funding made available through Arizona State University’s Knowledge Exchange for Resilience Fellowship.