The scientific consensus on climate change as a gateway belief: experimental evidence
Open accessAbstract
There is currently widespread public misunderstanding about the degree of scientific consensus on human-caused climate change, both in the US as well as internationally. Moreover, previous research has identified important associations between public perceptions of the scientific consensus, belief in climate change and support for climate policy. This paper extends this line of research by advancing and providing experimental evidence for a "gateway belief model" (GBM). Using national data (N = 1104) from a consensus-message experiment, we find that increasing public perceptions of the scientific consensus is significantly and causally associated with an increase in the belief that climate change is happening, human-caused and a worrisome threat. In turn, changes in these key beliefs are predictive of increased support for public action. In short, we find that perceived scientific agreement is an important gateway belief, ultimately influencing public responses to climate change.
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Some recent evidence suggests that when people are taught about the role of consensus and what the consensus is on a topic, this can help to bring their ideas into alignment with the science.
“Some recent evidence suggests that when people are taught about the role of consensus and what the consensus is on a topic, this can help to bring their ideas into alignment with the science (Goldberg et al., 2022;van der Linden et al., 2015).”
From Learning to evaluate sources of science (mis)information on the internet: Assessing students' scientific online reasoning (2025) · cites this paper as van der Linden et al., 2015
The Discussion reports that a simple description of the scientific consensus shifted participants’ perceptions and subsequent climate-change beliefs in directions consistent with climate science. The paper supports teaching people what the consensus is, but our copy does not show that participants were taught about the role of consensus as a separate part of the intervention. (LLM, conf=0.83)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredExperimental studies have consistently shown that consensus messages can effectively correct people's perceptions of what scientists believe about climate change.
“experimental studies have consistently shown that consensus messages can effectively correct people's perceptions of what scientists believe about climate change (Van der Linden et al., 2015;Deryugina and Shurchkov, 2016;Bolsen and Druckman, 2018).”
From Factual belief polarization between Democrats and Republicans: source or epiphenomenon of ideological and affective polarization? (2024) · cites this paper as Van der Linden et al., 2015
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- Authors
- van der Linden, S. L., Leiserowitz, A. A., Feinberg, G. D., & Maibach, E. W.
- Affiliations
- Yale University (US)
- George Mason University (US)
- Venue
- PLOS ONE
- Publisher
- Public Library of Science (PLoS)
- Published
- 2015-02-25
- Volume
- 10
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- e0118489
- ISSN
- 1932-6203 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC4340922
- OpenAlex
- W2139841269
- Cited by
- 661
- References
- 28
- Citations by year
- 2026: 53 · 2025: 50 · 2024: 51 · 2023: 47 · 2022: 88 · 2021: 76 · 2020: 78 · 2019: 65 · 2018: 57 · 2017: 42 · 2016: 37 · 2015: 17
- FWCI
- 168.59
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- PLoS ONE (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Funders
- American Association for the Advancement of Science
- Rockefeller Family Fund
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Climate Change Communication and Perception
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Climate Change Policy and Economics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Risk Perception and Management
- Keywords
- scientific consensus, climate change beliefs, public perception of science, anthropogenic climate change, climate policy support
- MeSH terms
- Humans, Models, Theoretical, Consensus, Climate Change
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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