Attitude Formation and Political Behavior in Response to Global Change

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This project will develop an innovative set of instruments to study how members of the general public react to emerging global environmental problems. The proposal assumes that willingness to take action on environmental issues is influenced by some combination of the underlying backgrounds and values of individuals and the way in which environmental issues enter their awareness and are framed for them. The researchers will design a set of questions to assess willingness to take action in regard to four specific environmental problems: greenhouse warming, species loss, and two "newly emerging" environmental issues to be chosen during the course of the research. Vignettes in the questionnaire involving each environmental problem will be experimentally manipulated to vary whether they involve claims of harm to the individual, to others, or to the biosphere, and whether such claims of harm are said to be disputed by some experts or not. Willingness to take action will be assessed through a variety of questions concerning willingness to pay for countermeasures and likelihood of joining activities to pressure private industry and government agencies to deal with environmental problems. These vignettes and other parts of the questionnaire will be developed through a series of pilot studies and then employed in a small scale (N=200) telephone survey of a representative sample of adults living in Northern Virginia. If this project is successful, the researchers contemplate mounting a larger investigation employing the experimentally varying questionnaire vignettes developed here. This project will contribute to an understanding of the conditions under which members of the general public are likely to join activities designed to deal with emerging environmental problems. In addition, this research will improve our understanding of the general process by which attitudes in regard to emerging and unstable issues become formed.