A motivational systems approach to investigating opinions on climate change
Abstract
Understanding how people form opinions about climate change has proven to be challenging. One of the most common approaches to studying climate change beliefs is to assume people employ motivated reasoning. We first detail how scholars in this area have applied motivated reasoning perspectives, identifying a variety of different judgment goals on which they have focused. We next argue that existing findings fail to conclusively show motivated reasoning, much less isolate which specific goals guide opinion formation about climate change. Then, we describe a novel motivational systems framework that would allow a more precise identification of the role of motivated reasoning in such opinions. Finally, we conclude by providing examples from completed and planned studies that apply this framework. Ultimately, we hope to give scholars and practitioners better tools to isolate why people hold the climate opinions they do and to develop effective communication strategies to change those opinions.
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Few (if any) studies actually connect the dots between psychological speculations about partisan communication activating group-justifying motives or conservative communication activating system-justifying motives and the mechanisms that mediate message reception.
“However, few (if any) studies actually connect the dots (see, for example, critiques of existing research on motivated political reasoning103,300,301).”
From Cognitive–motivational mechanisms of political polarization in social-communicative contexts (2022) · cites this paper as [301]
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“…Tappin et al. (2020a, 2020b) explain, the problem with exclusively inferring the effects of directional motivations in this case is that people’s identities are often correlated with their exposure to and learning of what they consider “high quality” information (see also Druckman & McGrath, 2019).”
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Cognitive–motivational mechanisms of political polarization in social-communicative contexts
Jost, J. T., Baldassarri, D. S., & Druckman, J. N. (2022) · Nature Reviews Psychology · doi:10.1038/s44159-022-00093-5 · Cited by 276 · see citing works
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- Authors
- Molden, D. C., Bayes, R., & Druckman, J. N.
- Affiliations
- Northwestern University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Molden, Daniel C.
- Venue
- Thinking & Reasoning
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2021-09-28
- Volume
- 28
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 396-427
- ISSN
- 1354-6783 (ISSN-L)
- 1464-0708
- OpenAlex
- W3204345446
- Cited by
- 12
- References
- 15
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 1 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 2 · 2022: 4
- FWCI
- 2.77
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Thinking & Reasoning (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Climate Change Communication and Perception
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Social and Intergroup Psychology
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Climate Change Policy and Economics
- Keywords
- climate change beliefs, motivated reasoning, opinion formation, climate change communication, belief revision
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