Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

Although people are quite aware of global warming, their beliefs about it may be malleable; specifically, their beliefs may be constructed in response to questions about global warming. Beliefs may reflect irrelevant but salient information, such as the current day’s temperature. This replacement of a more complex, less easily accessed judgment with a simple, more accessible one is known as attribute substitution. In three studies, we asked residents of the United States and Australia to report their opinions about global warming and whether the temperature on the day of the study was warmer or cooler than usual. Respondents who thought that day was warmer than usual believed more in and had greater concern about global warming than did respondents who thought that day was colder than usual. They also donated more money to a global-warming charity if they thought that day seemed warmer than usual. We used instrumental variable regression to rule out some alternative explanations.

Keywords

judgment environmental effects

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Angrist

J.D.

Krueger

A.B.

(2001). Instrumental variables and the search for identification: From supply and demand to natural experiments. The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 15, 69–85.

Berkeley

(1988). Three dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. New York, NY: Penguin. (Original work published 1713)

Conlin

O’Donoghue

Vogelsang

N.J.

(2007). Projection bias in catalog orders. American Economic Review, 97, 1217–1249.

Diamond

Hausman

(1994). Contingent valuation: Is some number better than no number? The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 8, 45–64.

Egan

P.J.

Mullin

(2010). Turning personal experience into political attitudes: The effect of local weather on Americans’ perceptions about global warming. Manuscript in preparation.

Fischhoff

(1991). Value elicitation: Is there anything in there? American Psychologist, 46, 835–847.

Joireman

Truelove

H.B.

Duell

(2010). Effect of outdoor temperature, heat primes and anchoring on belief in global warming. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 30, 358–367.

Kahneman

Frederick

(2002). Representativeness revisited: Attribute substitution in intuitive judgment. In Gilovich

Griffin

Kahneman

(Eds.), Heuristics and biases (pp. 49–81). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Leiserowitz

Shome

Marx

Hammer

Broad

(2008). New York City global warming survey. Retrieved February 4, 2010, from http://environment.yale.edu/climate/files/NYCreport.pdf

10.

Lichtenstein

Slovic

(Eds.). (2006). The construction of preference. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

11.

Miguel

Satyanath

Sergenti

(2004). Economic shocks and civil conflict: An instrumental variables approach. Journal of Political Economy, 112, 725–753.

12.

Paxson

C.H.

(1992). Using weather variability to estimate the response of savings to transitory income in Thailand. American Economic Review, 82, 15–33.

13.

Payne

J.W.

Bettman

J.R.

Johnson

E.J.

. (1992). Behavioral decision research: A constructive processing perspective. Annual Review of Psychology, 43, 87–131.

14.

Pugliese

Ray

(2009). A heated debate: Global attitudes toward climate change. Harvard International Review, 30, 64.

15.

Revkin

A.C.

(2008, April 1). Gore group plans ad blitz on global warming. The New York Times. Retrieved March 23, 2010, from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/business/media/01green.html?_r=2

16.

Risen

J.L.

Critcher

C.R.

(in press). Visceral fit: While in a visceral state, associated states of the world seem more likely. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

17.

Sargan

J.D.

(1958). The estimation of economic relationships using instrumental variables. Econometrica, 26, 393–415.

18.

Schuldt

J.P.

Schwarz

(2008, February). Do people believe in global warming? Depends on what the weather’s like when you ask. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Albuquerque, NM.

19.

Schwarz

Clore

G.L.

(1983). Mood, misattribution, and judgments of well-being: Informative and directive functions of affective states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45, 513–523.

20.

Simonsohn

(2007). Clouds make nerds look good: Field evidence of the impact of incidental factors on decision making. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 20, 143–152.

21.

Simonsohn

(2010). Weather to go to college. Economic Journal, 120, 270–280.

22.

Slovic

(1995). The construction of preference. American Psychologist, 50, 364–371.

23.

Solomon

Qin

Manning

Chen

Marquis

Averyt

(Eds.) (2007). Climate change 2007: The physical science basis. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

24.

Weber

E.U.

(1997). Perception and expectation of climate change: Precondition for economic and technological adaptation. In Bazerman

Messick

Tenbrunsel

Wade-Benzoni

(Eds.), Psychological perspectives to environmental and ethical issues in management (pp. 314–341). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

25.

Williams

L.E.

Bargh

J.A.

(2008). Experiencing physical warmth promotes interpersonal warmth. Science, 322, 606–607.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.08 MB

Local Warming

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References

Supplementary Material