A SOCIAL IDENTITY-BASED APPROACH TO IMPROVING CLIMATE CHANGE COMMUNICATION AND MOBILIZING COLLECTIVE ACTION

Abstract

Individual actions that contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation, while important, are insufficient on their own. Unfortunately, there is still a disconnect between the seriousness of the problem and our ability or willingness to take appropriate collective action; political polarization is one explanation. The Social Identity Approach, which includes social identity (Tajfel, 1978; Tajfel & Turner, 1979) and self-categorization theory (Turner, 1985; Turner et al., 1987), provides crucial insight into whether people partake in collective action behaviors, such as voting, to address climate change. Drawing on that literature, this study explored whether highlighting the well-being co-benefits of collective action, benefits such as human health, could create social conditions for people across the political spectrum to shift social identification, or re-categorize, to identify more inclusively and less with their own partisan identity. To test these ideas, an experiment was conducted where participants read one of 8 versions of a vignette depicting a hypothetical community working together to address climate change. The goal was to learn whether emphasizing the well-being co-benefits of collective action would influence collective action intentions both directly and indirectly via two sets of mediators: (1) the degree to which individuals identified with people in the depicted community as well as perceived social support participants might feel in a similar situation, and (2) participants’ history of climate change-related interpersonal communication and efficacy, or the belief that collective actions work. In addition, I included information about the political makeup of community members to explore the influence of political cues in moderating these mediated pathways. I used Hayes’ PROCESS macro to explore these relationships. While exposure to the vignettes did not, by itself, yield significant effects on identification with the community or a sense that one would receive social support as part of the community, hypotheses related to mediated effects were found to be significant. Further, moderation analysis found a boomerang effect for liberals who weakly identified as such. A boomerang effect occurs when a message is strategically constructed with a specific intent but produces a result that is the opposite of that intent (Byrne & Hart, 2009). Conversely, conservatives who weakly and/or moderately identified as such demonstrated a shift toward identification with the depicted community when its members were depicted as an ideological mix. For these conservatives, collective action intentions were heightened by exposure to the vignettes, as mediated by identification and then interpersonal discussion intentions, when the vignette conditions characterized community members as both liberal and conservative: suggesting that recategorization, did occur. For these conservatives, intent to engage in climate change collective action increased when mediated by identification and intentions to discuss the issue. This research advances climate change communication scholarship by elucidating the conditions that help build collective action intentions for those typically disinclined to address climate change. Results suggest potential pathways to enable individuals to self-select to engage in climate change collective action through social identification processes.