There are effects, but they are small-to-medium only. (Remember this is people who *do* vs people who *do not* believe in anthropogenic climate change.) ‘Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.‘

Study in US on who picks up a coupon for a free tire-pressure check from a billboard saying it will save money vs it will save the environment vs it will make you safe vs just ‘have one’ ( = control)

(Severson & Coleman, 2015) also found that money doesn’t help, whereas ethical appeals do.

This is a study in which. Participants were just visitors to a local garage in North America and they were shown a display which offered a leaflet to get a free tire pressure check on your car and the poster advertising the Leaflet either said get a free tire pressure check on your car to save the environment. So kind of environmental motivation. It could say nothing. It could say get a free tire check to improve your safety or it could say get a free tire check to save you money. Right now this is very counterintuitive, so for me I would be like, Yeah, save money. That's it. I should go and get my tires checked, but actually the number of leaflets taken from the save money thing was almost non and the most leaflets were taken from the post. As you can see there was advertising the environmental benefits of getting your tires checked. Good news you try to motivate humans on climate issues by money and they don't respond. You try to motivate them with the climate issue itself, the ethical issues, save the planet and they do tend to respond very strongly. Many studies like this, also indicating that when you try to tell people look, you know something bad will happen to you or you can gain some money. They're very unresponsive in those cases. What tends to have an effect on behavior, as in this study, is the appeal to the ethical issues around climate change. That's what appeals to motivate people.

So it's moral convictions and the emotions they evoke that shape political attitudes. These are not the only factors, but by that they are by far the most. Important factors of those that we can manipulate.

Fig. 1. Results from Study 1a: mean morality rating as a function of political ideology (liberal = 1 SD below the mean; conservative = 1 SD above the mean) and experimental condition. Error bars represent ±1 SEM.

‘The one difference was whether or not, after eating his lunch, the target chose to recycle his plastic water bottle (recycle condition) or throw it away as garbage (not-recycle condition). In the control condition, there was no mention of this bottle. Participants then rated the target on how moral they perceived him to be overall on a scale from 1 (not moral at all) to 6 (extremely moral)’ (Feinberg & Willer, 2013, p. 3).

This paper is about how to detect multiple mediators (see figure 2), but we don't need that complexity.

Point is that that the US is special.

‘Relationship between left–right political ideology and climate change scepticism’

‘Correlations between climate change scepticism and left–right political ideology across 25 samples. Western, English-speaking countries are grouped at the bottom. Tests of the difference between independent correlations using the Fisher r-to-z transformation demonstrated the United States to have a significantly larger correlation than all other nations (P < 0.05) except Australia (P = 0.171). The error bars show 95% confidence intervals.’

‘The relationship was particularly strong in the United States, but reliable relationships also emerged in countries such as Australia, Canada, and Brazil. Interestingly, however, in roughly three quarters of countries the relationship between political conservatism and climate skepticism was so weak as to be statistically nonsignificant. This suggests that there is nothing inherent to conservative ideology that leads people to reject climate science’ (Hornsey & Fielding, 2020, p. 8)

Caption: ‘Mean levels of engagement on electricity conservation actions as a function of liberal ideology and individualising moral foundations.’

‘The graphed interaction and simple slopes analysis show that individuals with strong individualising morals evidenced a positive relationship between liberal ideology and electricity conservation simple slope = .12, t = 2.03, p = .040), whereas individuals who reported weak individualising morals evidenced a negative relationship simple slope = -.12, t = 2.03, p = .040)’ (Milfont et al., 2019, p. 10)

Different picture: mediation before, interaction here. But suggests that there is a role for moral foundations in explaining attitudes and behaviour.