Suchergebnisse

We investigated the link between party identification and several cognitive styles that are associated with open-minded thinking. We used a web-based survey which involved participants rating the strength of an argument they initially disagreed with. Results showed that Democrats tend to score higher and Republicans tend to score lower on open-minded cognitive style variables. However, mediation analyses showed that these partisan differences in cognitive style generally have negligible relationships with how individuals assess the strength of arguments they disagree with. In other words, partisan differences in cognitive style may often make little meaningful difference to information processing.

We tested 44 variations in profiles of climate change activists to see what affected willingness to associate with them. The largest effects were from activists' perspectives on climate change, how often they pressure others, gun control views, and party affiliation. If implemented as a traditional factorial experiment, this experiment would require 648,000 conditions and an infeasibly large sample. We obtained our results much more efficiently via an experimental design rare in communication research. Conjoint experiments will be useful to science communication researchers who wish to simultaneously test many factors of complex stimuli, such as individuals, organizations, technologies, or policies.

Recent evidence suggests that a research-practice gap exists for climate change communication, whereby practitioners are not making optimal use of knowledge that exists and scholars are not answering questions most relevant to practitioners. Closer collaboration between academics and practitioners is one way to close this gap. We recount our collaboration with a group of Sierra Club staff and volunteers working to improve their climate advocacy and organizing activities. From our collaboration, four ways of improving future collaborations emerged, relating to broad versus narrow applicability of communication recommendations, strategy versus tactics, academic versus experiential knowledge, and proactive versus reactive support.

Abstract
Local television (TV) weathercasters are a potentially promising source of climate education, in that weather is the primary reason viewers watch local TV news, large segments of the public trust TV weathercasters as a source of information about global warming, and extreme weather events are increasingly common (Leiserowitz et al.; U.S. Global Change Research Program). In an online experiment conducted in two South Carolina cities (Greenville, n = 394; Columbia, n = 352) during and immediately after a summer heat wave, the effects on global warming risk perceptions were examined following exposure to a TV weathercast in which a weathercaster explained the heat wave as a local manifestation of global warming versus exposure to a 72-h forecast of extreme heat. No main effect of the global warming video on learning was found. However, a significant interaction effect was found: subjects who evaluated the TV weathercaster more positively were positively influenced by the global warming video, and viewers who evaluated the weathercaster less positively were negatively influenced by the video. This effect was strongest among politically conservative viewers. These results suggest that weathercaster-delivered climate change education can have positive, albeit nuanced, effects on TV-viewing audiences.