When you think about having a conversation with others in your life about climate change, what comes to mind? Maybe you recall the miserable half-hour rant from Uncle Fred about how he thinks climate change is a hoax at the Thanksgiving table a few years ago? Or maybe, like most Americans, you don't talk about climate change very often and aren't sure what to expect.
We conducted three studies to answer two questions: Do people avoid discussions about climate change in part because they overestimate how unpleasant they will be? And would participating in these discussions reduce negative evaluations of possible future discussions?
Do People Overestimate Discomfort in Conversations?
People's predictions of how they will feel in possible future scenarios are often wrong. We examined whether the tendency to overestimate the intensity and duration of emotions one will experience in future scenarios could lead to inaccurate forecasts about climate change conversations.
Previous research has shown this overestimate of future emotional impact in a variety of domains. For example, college students who forecast a romantic breakup expect to be emotionally devastated for quite some time. Yet, although college students who experienced a romantic breakup did feel negative emotions, the intensity of the negative emotions was not as severe as most participants anticipated.
We examined whether something similar would happen when people think about climate conversations. In our first study, we surveyed 192 university students before and after they participated in a 7-minute climate conversation in a small group of peers. Consistent with our speculation, participants reported experiencing less discomfort in these conversations than they had forecasted.
This overestimation of discomfort is meaningful because the more discomfort the students anticipated, the less willing they were to discuss climate change. That is, expecting to feel uncomfortable may motivate people to avoid climate change conversations and opportunities to build understanding, develop shared meaning, and address the climate issue.
How Having Climate Change Conversations Reduces Anticipated Discomfort in Future Conversations
Perhaps actually having this type of discussion improves the ability to forecast feelings in future conversations. Experience talking about climate change provides an example of what to expect in the conversation and may show a person they have the ability to effectively engage in such a dialogue.
Our second study found that more prior experience with climate change conversations was associated with less anticipated discomfort about having future conversations about climate change. Similarly, our third study, which examined the effects of student participation in discussions through the Penn State University World in Conversation program, illustrated the benefits of actually engaging in such discussions. Students were assigned to participate in a 90-minute discussion either about climate change or racism, and completed surveys two weeks before and two weeks after their discussion. After the discussion, students anticipated less discomfort in discussing the same topic in the future than they had before the discussion. Thus, the discussion provided a relatively positive experience that informed their forecast of future discussions. Experiences such as this could be incorporated into classroom activities to provide opportunities to practice discussing difficult topics.
Both of these studies found that self-efficacy was key to reducing anticipated discomfort. In fact, the relationship between past experience discussing climate change and future expectations of discomfort was explained by the participant's self-efficacy, or perceptions that they had the ability to successfully discuss the topic.
For Further Reading
Dorison, C. A., Minson, J. A., & Rogers, T. (2019). Selective exposure partly relies on faulty affective forecasts. Cognition, 188, 98–107. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2019.02.010
Eastwick, P. W., Finkel, E. J., Krishnamurti, T., & Loewenstein, G. (2008). Mispredicting distress following romantic breakup: Revealing the time course of the affective forecasting error. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44(3), 800–807. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2007.07.001
Geiger, N., Swim, J. K., & Fraser, J. (2017). Creating a climate for change: Interventions, efficacy and public discussion about climate change. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 51, 104–116. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2017.03.010
Geiger, N., Swim, J. K., Mallett, R. K., & Mulvey, L. L. (2023). Experience matters: Civic discussion increases self-efficacy and reduces forecasted discomfort in future conversations. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 19485506221143593. https://doi.org/10.1177/19485506221143593
Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2005). Affective forecasting: Knowing what to want. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14(3), 131–134. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2005.00355.x
Nathaniel Geiger is an Assistant Professor of Communication Science at Indiana University Bloomington. His research focuses on psychological and emotional barriers to and motivators of engagement with collective challenges and how (mis)perceptions of others' beliefs and behaviors on these issues influence engagement.
Janet K. Swim is a Professor of Psychology at The Pennsylvania State University. She is currently studying how values, relationships with nature, emotions, and knowledge about environmental systems influence pro-environmental actions and support for policies.
Robyn K. Mallett is a Professor of Psychology at Loyola University Chicago. She studies how people understand and control the world around them through individual and collective action, with a special interest in how people identify and respond to bias.
Too Much Screen Time or Too Much Guilt?
We Love, They Hate! How People Talk About Emotions Reflects Division
