• DOI:10.1038/s41558-018-0157-2
• Corpus ID: 90931969

Relationships among conspiratorial beliefs, conservatism and climate scepticism across nations

@article{Hornsey2018RelationshipsAC,
  title={Relationships among conspiratorial beliefs, conservatism and climate scepticism across nations},
  author={Matthew J. Hornsey and Emily A. Harris and Kelly S. Fielding},
  journal={Nature Climate Change},
  year={2018},
  volume={8},
  pages={614-620}
}

• M. Hornsey, Emily A. Harris, K. Fielding
• Published 7 May 2018
• Environmental Science
• Nature Climate Change

Studies showing that scepticism about anthropogenic climate change is shaped, in part, by conspiratorial and conservative ideologies are based on data primarily collected in the United States. Thus, it may be that the ideological nature of climate change beliefs reflects something distinctive about the United States rather than being an international phenomenon. Here we find that positive correlations between climate scepticism and indices of ideology were stronger and more consistent in the United States than in the other 24 nations tested. This suggests that there is a political culture in the United States that offers particularly strong encouragement for citizens to appraise climate science through the lens of their worldviews. Furthermore, the weak relationships between ideology and climate scepticism in the majority of nations suggest that there is little inherent to conspiratorial ideation or conservative ideologies that predisposes people to reject climate science, a finding that has encouraging implications for climate mitigation efforts globally.This study shows that relationships between climate scepticism and indices of conspirational and conservative ideology are stronger and more consistent in the United States than in 24 other nations, with the majority of nations showing weak relationships.