Boryana Todorova
@todorova.bsky.social🌍 Thrilled to share our new preprint and the first part of my thesis! Using machine learning, we analyzed data from 55 countries to uncover key individual and nation-level predictors of climate change beliefs & behaviors. Let's dive in! 🧵 1/12
🔍 We tested 19 predictors on four different climate-relevant outcomes: climate change belief, policy support, willingness to share climate information on social media and engagement with a pro-environmental behavior task in a international sample of 4635 individuals. 2/12
Only four ❗ out of 19 predictors showed consistent effects for all outcomes.Two of them were environmentalist identity and trust in climate science. This suggests that fostering environmental identities and safeguarding trust in science should be high priority targets. 3/12
On the national level, we found that the Human Development Index (HDI) consistently predicted all climate-related outcomes. Interestingly, people from countries with lower HDI exhibited stronger climate change beliefs & behaviors. 🌎 4/12
💡 This is consistent with the precarity hypothesis suggesting that countries with lower affluence and thus not the same ability to buffer against the negative effects of climate change are more sensitive to the need for action #ClimateJustice #GlobalSouth 5/12
Not surprisingly, internal environmental motivation was related positively to all outcomes. However, we found a different pattern of results for external environmental motivation (e.g. “Because of today's politically correct standards, I try to appear pro-environmental.”). 6/12
External motivation was the second best predictor for willingness to share information online but it had a negative effect on the effortful pro-environmental behavior 🙃 So, while external motivation may drive public actions, it can backfire for private, effortful behavior. 7/12
🔍 Importantly, the majority of the predictors showed divergent effects, predicting some but not all outcomes or even having opposite effects. This highlights the complexity of our responses to climate change 🌍 8/12
We found a notable difference in explained variance per outcome: 58% for climate change beliefs, but only 10% for the effortful pro-environmental behavior. This aligns with other studies showing that pro-environmental tendencies often don’t translate into actual behavior. 9/12
Special thanks to my wonderful co-authors @kimdoell.bsky.social @cameronbrick.bsky.social @jayvanbavel.bsky.social @clauslamm.bsky.social @madalina.bsky.social and non-blueskyers Matthew Hornsey, Florian Lange, David Steyrl, and Samuel Pearson 11/12