Climate Change Consensus Messages Cause Reactance

ABSTRACT

Several recent studies have debated whether climate change consensus messages cause reactance, although they sometimes employ different procedures and measurement. This study uses procedures and measures from competing studies to allow for a comparison of the respective approaches. We find that climate change consensus messages cause reactance, particularly among Republicans and those who do not believe in anthropogenic climate change. These findings highlight concerns that consensus messaging strategies may be ineffective or backfire among audiences that science communicators are most keen to target.

KEYWORDS:

• Scientific consensus
• reactance
• climate change
• motivated reasoning

Data availability statement

The data that support these findings are available from the corresponding author, upon reasonable request.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 As with the data informing the van der Linden, Maibach, et al. (2019) study, these data also inform a separate study examining what role the decision to pretest climate belief measures has on reactions to a consensus message.

2 These data were collected while many U.S. states were under stay at home orders due to COVID-19. We therefore measured concern about COVID-19 with two items. Measurement is available in the supplemental information. COVID-19 concern did not vary by condition, so it was not included as a covariate in the results presented.