Documenting the Mechanisms of Belief and Attitude Change on Controversial Issues: The Case of Global Warming and Trust in Scientists

几十年的研究表明，美国人对政治问题的看法多年来变化非常缓慢。持某种特定观点的人的百分比的突然大幅变化只发生在非常罕见的情况下，而且只发生在引起全国关注的戏剧性事件之后，比如9·11恐怖袭击。最近，气候变化领域对这一观点提出了挑战。在短短两年的时间里，一些观察家认为，全国性的调查表明，很大一部分美国人已经改变了他们对全球变暖存在的个人看法。如果这是真的，这将对现有的舆论变化理论提出重大挑战，值得对这些理论进行修订，以便更准确地捕捉产生这种变化的过程。这个项目的目的是调查是否需要这样的理论修正。为此，两项新的调查监测了公众舆论的短期变化，探讨了最近几个月发生的任何舆论变化的原因。此外，实验还检验了问题措辞变化对信念和偏好随时间变化的影响的假设。统计分析探讨了调查访谈时和访谈前的当地天气状况影响一些受访者所表达的信念的可能性。为了记录最近事件的影响，一些受访者（随机选择）在互联网调查中接触到有关东安格利亚电子邮件和IPCC报告可疑方面的新闻报道，而其他受访者则没有看到此类报道。然后，所有受访者都会报告他们对一系列相关问题的个人意见。这种方法记录了这些消息在当前信息环境中的因果影响。这个项目的价值不仅在于它将有助于记录和解释在紧张的政策环境中政治相关观念和偏好的变化，还在于它将有助于阐明当前与政策密切相关的心理过程。据说，许多政策制定者对最近关于气候变化的民意调查反应强烈，通常是撤回他们支持旨在改善气候变化的立法的意愿，因为这些立法者认为美国公众越来越不愿意支持这种努力。这里提出的研究的附带好处是，它将帮助这些立法者解释广泛宣传的民意调查结果，对调查结果的科学方法的影响变得越来越敏感，并根据真实而不是误导性的说法来规划他们的立法工作，这些说法是关于美国公众相信什么，以及它希望政府在这个领域实施什么。

Decades of research have suggested that Americans' opinions on political issues change very slowly over years. Sudden large shifts in the percent of people who hold a particular view occur only very rarely and only in response to dramatic events that capture the attention of the entire nation, such as the September 11 attacks. Recently, a challenge to this view has been posited in the domain of climate change. During a period of just two years, some observers have viewed national surveys as indicating that large proportions of Americans have changed their personal opinions about the existence of global warming. If true, this would represent a significant challenge to existing theories of public opinion change and would merit a revision of those theories so that they more accurately capture the processes that produce such change.This project is designed to investigate whether such theoretical amendments are required. To do so, two new surveys monitor short-term change in public opinion explore the causes of whatever opinion change has occurred in recent months. Furthermore, experiments test hypotheses about the impact of question wording changes on the appearance of over-time shifts in beliefs and preferences on this issue. Statistical analyses explore the possibility that local weather conditions at the time of the survey interviews and preceding those interviews have influenced the expressed beliefs of some respondents. To document the impact of recent events, some respondents (chosen randomly) in an Internet survey are exposed to news stories about the East Anglia emails and the questionable aspects of the IPCC reports, and other respondents do not see such stories. All respondents then report their personal opinions on a wide range of related issues. This approach documents the causal impact of such messages in the current information environment.This project will have value not just because it will help document and explain changes in politically relevant perceptions and preferences in a charged policy environment, but also because it will help to illuminate psychological processes of great policy relevance at the moment. Many policy-makers are said to be reacting strongly to the recent opinion polls on climate change, often by pulling back on their willingness to support legislation aimed at ameliorating climate change, because these legislators perceive the American public to be increasingly unwilling to support such efforts. A collateral benefit of the research proposed here is that it will help these legislators to interpret the widely-publicized poll results, to become increasingly sensitive to the impact of scientific methodology of survey findings, and to plan their legislative efforts based upon veridical rather than misleading claims about what the American public believes and what it wants its government to implement in this arena.