Climate Change Consensus Messages May Cause Reactance in Conservatives, But There is No Meta-Analytic Evidence That They Backfire

ABSTRACT

Recent studies suggest climate change consensus messages may cause psychological reactance for conservatives. However, it remains unknown how much this reactance impacts the effectiveness of consensus messaging. Using data from a recent meta-analysis on climate change interventions, the current paper seeks to add context to the debate over reactance. We integrated data from 20 experiments (N = 19,200 participants) that test how consensus messages (compared to a control condition) impact climate change attitudes. The effect of consensus messages on attitudes was small yet statistically significant and positive (g = 0.09), and not significantly moderated by political affiliation. Moreover, the moderating role of political affiliation was similar for consensus messages compared to other interventions for climate change attitudes. While conservatives may experience resistance to consensus messages, there is little meta-analytic evidence that consensus messages backfire.

KEYWORDS:

• Consensus messaging
• psychological reactance
• climate change
• meta-analysis

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 In the original paper, there were some overlaps between types of intervention (e.g. consensus and emotion) which required grouping some consensus interventions as other types (e.g. emotion). In the current analysis, since the focus is on consensus interventions, we included all interventions that included information about the scientific consensus.

2 In the original paper, we estimated the effect size for consensus messages alone and tested if political affiliation was a significant moderator of it. All other analyses in this paper are new (e.g. Figure 1, Table 1, estimating g for each political group).

3 For a longer discussion about the importance of an effect size of this magnitude, see the original paper.