Approaches to Climate Change and the American Public

We run online surveys in the United States. We recruit participants through professional survey companies to ensure that our sample is representative of the U.S. population along key dimensions - gender, race, age, and political affiliation. To be eligible, subjects must be adults (age 18+) and must be citizens of the country. The surveys will be performed online.

2023-08-15

2023-09-30

Support for and views on climate mitigation policies, support for and views on climate friendly behaviors, voting preferences across major policy areas, real outcomes (e.g., donation to charity, signing petition)

We will ask questions about perceptions on climate change and various climate policies; views, ranking, and voting preferences of major policy areas including climate change; and views, stated preference, and revealed preference for engaging in various climate actions. We will construct various indexes that summarize support for climate change, support for government intervention on climate issues, beliefs and knowledge about climate change, and so on. In the text analysis, we will construst measures of “topics” and “sentiment” using text analysis tools.

We will also tell respondents that they have been automatically enrolled in a lottery to win a given amount of dollars. Before being informed if they have won, each respondent will decide how much to donate the winnings (if at all) to a particular environmental organization. We use the amount respondents wish to donate as a (real) measure of support for climate change. We will also ask respondents if they are willing to sign a pro-climate petition. Lastly, if partnership with a solar company is successfully established, we will measure real-world changes in respondents’ willingness to learn about and/or adopt solar technologies.

We will both evaluate the experimental outcome variables, as well as the heterogeneity of individual characteristics of respondents. This will involve analyzing outcomes by sub-groups as defined by income, age, gender, political affiliation, education level, employment status, economic preferences, and climate segmentation (potentially adopting a methodology developed by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication).

In the treatment group, there are three treatment arms. Respondents will see either: video A, video B, or video A immediately followed by video B. Video A provides information on the major problems caused by climate change (e.g., heatwaves, storms, loss of biodiversity). Video B provides information on the major opportunities introduced by fighting climate change (e.g., cleaner air, less wildfires, better agricultural practices). The treatment will be followed by questions on climate attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Blocks of questions about different climate change mitigation policies will also be asked to understand respondents’ level of support for different types of climate policies.

Not available

The randomization will be done by the survey software (Qualtrics).

We randomize individual participants into control and treatment groups.

No

1 country

2,500 respondents (approx. 500 for obfuscated follow-up study)

Around 625 respondents for the control group, around 625 respondents for each of the three treatment arms