Too Close to Care? A Replication Study to Re-examine the Effect of Cued Distance on Climate Change Engagement.

ABSTRACT

This study replicates a cued distance design (Schuldt, Rickard, & Yang, 2018. Does reduced psychological distance increase climate engagement? on the limits of localizing climate change. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 55, 147–153. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2018.02.001) to examine its impact on perceived psychological distance and mental construal of climate change impacts. Based on two undergraduate samples (total N = 415) in Singapore, the cued distance manipulation (proximal vs. distal) successfully led to different spatial distance perceptions in both samples; however, we were unable to replicate the effect of cued distance manipulation on mental construal. In study 1, among liberals, the proximal distance condition elevated risk perception, policy support, and behavioral intention, but decreased negative affect. In study 2, liberals reported greater policy support and behavioral intention regardless of cued distance manipulation. These findings indicate that simply narrowing the perceived distance of climate change impacts fall short in generating greater climate change engagement; in fact, depending on political orientation, proximal cues about climate change impacts may exacerbate polarization. Future research should continue to explore the utility of the construal level theory of psychological distance and its value in environmental communication research.

KEYWORDS:

• Cued distance
• climate change
• construal level
• experiment

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, [JY], upon reasonable request.

Notes

1 Participants were asked to identify the end location in the map task mentioned below. Filler items included New York City, Buffalo, New York, and Dubai.

2 Compared to the U.S. participants from study 2 (M = 9.11, SD = 1.41) in Schuldt et al. (2018), Singaporean participants in our study 1 reported significantly closer perceived distance, t = 10.71, p < .001, Cohen’s d = 1.07.