Providing accurate information about the climate crisis can help to correct misperceptions about how much public support exists for action.
However, simply showing that others support climate action does not, on its own, have a meaningful impact on people's own beliefs or behavioural intentions, a new study based on data from Germany shows, challenging common expectations about the power of public consensus to drive climate action.
The study finds that learning about widespread public support for climate action policies can initially make people think such policies are more politically feasible and more likely to be implemented. However, these effects are small and short-lived, raising questions about how effective such communication strategies are in practice.
The data were collected in collaboration with YouGov in Germany in 2021 and include 2,801 respondents. The same people were surveyed twice, around two weeks apart. Some participants were shown information about how widespread public support for climate action actually is in Germany. Others were not shown this information.
Overall, people in Germany had a fairly accurate sense of how much public support exists for climate action. On average, they did not believe that only a small minority supports action to combat climate change. At the same time, some people underestimated how many others supported climate action and specific climate policies.
Among those who underestimated public support, the information shown in the study made a clear difference. When presented with evidence of how widespread support for climate action is, they updated their views about public opinion. This learning was not fleeting. It was still visible when the same people were surveyed again two weeks later.
Importantly, this learning was limited to perceptions of public opinion. Knowing that many others supported climate action did not change people's own beliefs about climate change, such as whether human activity is the main cause, their personal preferences for climate policies, or their intentions to change their behaviour, for example using public transport instead of a car.
There was one partial exception. People who learned about broad public support initially found political climate action more feasible. For example, they were slightly more likely to think that policies such as taxing goods based on their CO₂ emissions could realistically be implemented. However, this effect faded by the follow-up survey.
The study, published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, was conducted within the Debunker Lab, led by Jason Reifler (University of Southampton; formerly University of Exeter). The research is led by Matthew Barnfield (Queen Mary University of London) and co-authored by Paula Szewach (Barcelona Supercomputing Center), Sabrina Stöckli (University of Bern), Florian Stoeckel (University of Exeter), Jack Thompson (University of Leeds), Joseph Phillips (Cardiff University), Benjamin Lyons (University of Utah), and Vittorio Mérola (Durham University).
Dr Barnfield said: "Learning how much consensus there is in support for policy action on climate change seems to durably increase people's perceptions of that consensus, even for policies that we didn't specifically tell them about. But that does not seem to have much effect on how much people support or even themselves adopt environmentally friendly actions. This finding might disappoint experts who have argued for this approach as a way to accelerate climate action in democracies."
Professor Stoeckel added: "People do learn what others think on climate change, and that learning can persist. At the same time, our study shows clear limits to what can be expected from this strategy. Simply telling people that climate action is widely supported is likely not enough to change beliefs, preferences, or behaviour."
