How Aware Are Other Nations of Climate Change? Analyzing Germans’ Second-Order Climate Change Beliefs About Chinese, US American and German People

ABSTRACT

What people believe about the beliefs of other people – second-order beliefs – has been acknowledged as a key factor that shapes public support for international climate policy. However, very little is known about their origins. Based on data from an online survey (n = 935), we analyzed how German citizens assess the climate change awareness in their own nation as compared to those of the US and China. Even if the public climate change awareness in the US and China factually differs, we found that German citizens equivalently rate both nations similar and much lower than their own, a finding which can be explained with social identity processes and “in-group”/“out-group” biases. Hierarchical regression analyses demonstrate that the attention individuals pay towards television and social media predict second-order beliefs on climate change awareness positively, while attention to print media is a negative predictor.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change awareness
• second-order beliefs
• media effects

Acknowledgements

The research presented in this paper was conducted as part of the project “Climate change from the audience perspective” under the direction of Prof. Dr Irene Neverla and Prof. Dr Monika Taddicken. The authors would like to thank Ines Lörcher and Prof. Dr Irene Neverla for their contributions to the project. Further, we are most thankful to all participants who took part in this study. A previous version of this article was presented at the annual conference of the International Communication Association (ICA), San Diego, May 2017. We thank all reviewers, colleagues and the audience for their very helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The survey was conducted by Respondi, one of Germany’s leading market research institutes and certified with the international standard ISO 26362, which monitors the quality of online sampling providers.

2 Please note that as the third wave was used here, this sample is not full representative.

3 After data collection a sixth response option “no statement” was recoded into point 3 on the scale as both response options are assumed to denote “no information” or “I don’t know.”

4 A typology of Germans’ online engagement in the climate change online discourse is presented by Taddicken and Reif (2016).

Additional information

Funding

This project was part of the Special Priority Program 1409 “Science and the public,” which was funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG).