Socio-Structural and Psychological Foundations of Climate Change Beliefs

Abstract

Using a national probability sample of over 6,000 New Zealanders, this study examines socio-structural and psychological variables underpinning core climate change beliefs—“climate change is real” and “climate change is caused by humans”. Analyses focused on four belief profiles: those who believe in the reality of climate change and its human cause (53%), those undecided (30%), the complete skeptics (10%) and those who believe the climate is changing but is not caused by human activity (7%). Results support and extend a “conservative white male” effect in doubts concerning the science of human-caused climate change. Uniformly high beliefs in climate change reality and human cause was observed among respondents who were younger, female, educated, politically liberal, belonged to minority groups and who perceived that they were able to influence environmental outcomes. Belief in climate change was also stronger for those who endorse altruistic and openness values and who were high in personality trait levels of Agreeableness and Openness to Experience. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 109 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.