Project 2.1

We need to urgently find ways to communicate about climate change which are effective in conveying accurate information, building the social cohesion that forms the basis for mitigation action, and resisting the polarizing influence of disinformation campaigns. The project will develop strategies for effective messaging about climate change whilst taking into account that the epistemic environment is heavily infused with disinformation. It will synthesize insights from philosophy, climate science, psychology and sociology in service of designing well-supported communication strategies, and it will test the proposed strategies using computational models and experimental studies

The aim of the project is to develop strategies and practically applicable recommendations for messaging effectively about climate change, whilst taking into account that the epistemic environment is heavily infused with disinformation. Effective messaging is essential for building the social cohesion needed to combat global warming and for avoiding the disruptive effects of unmitigated warming and polarization around climate change issues on social cohesion. To be effective, messaging needs to combat the factual misconceptions which are promulgated, but it should also have a depolarizing effect and help bridge divides between societal groups, making people less vulnerable to the divisive and polarizing strategies of disinformation campaigns and reducing prejudice between groups who disagree on climate-related issues.

The project will develop and articulate the main hypothesis, devising candidates for effective climate communication strategies. It will be informed by a philosophical analysis of what is normatively desirable for climate communication among a number of dimensions, with a particular focus on the preservation of social cohesion. It will also synthesize insights from a number of independently developing areas of research (primarily climate science, philosophy, psychology and sociology) in service of designing a well-supported communication strategy.

The theoretical development will draw on computational models and will integrate modelling frameworks in social epistemology (e.g., Henderson & Gebharter, 2021) with social influence model approaches from sociology (e.g., Flache et al., 2017). This will help elaborate an understanding of the context, in which the influence of the communication competes with the influence of disinformation campaigns. In particular, it will elucidate the interaction between the epistemic and the affective mechanisms at work in driving opinions. The project will explore how the messaging style can be most effectively attuned to the given societal context and existing group identities.

The theoretical work will provide the basis for an empirical test of the main hypothesis. The experimental study will build upon and further develop existing online experiment paradigms that assess the spreading of falsehoods in social networks. It will investigate influence on normative issues in addition to factual issues to test how agreement with normative statements about climate change behaviour depends on the moderation of the statement, the network embedding of the sender and receiver of the corresponding statements and their respective group or ideological identities.