Current surveys may underestimate climate change skepticism evidence from list experiments in Germany and the USA.

ABSTRACT: Strong public support is a prerequisite for ambitious and thus costly climate change mitigation policy, and strong public concern over climate change is a prerequisite for policy support. Why, then, do most public opinion surveys indicate rather high levels of concern and rather strong policy support, while de facto mitigation efforts in most countries remain far from ambitious? One possibility is that survey measures for public concern fail to fully reveal the true attitudes of citizens due to social desirability bias. In this paper, we implemented list-experiments in representative surveys in Germany and the United States (N = 3620 and 3640 respectively) to assess such potential bias. We find evidence that people systematically misreport, that is, understate their disbelief in human caus

SUBMITTER: Beiser-McGrath LF 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8262789 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature