Is water vapour a greenhouse gas? Definitely not, many people are convinced – and they are wrong about this, as on other questions related to climate change. A study by researchers at the University of Graz shows that there is a significant discrepancy between proven facts and people’s supposed “knowledge”. This is problematic, because “misconceptions jeopardise the acceptance of climate protection measures and foster poor decision-making,” explain the authors of the study, Annina Thaller and Thomas Brudermann from the Institute of Systems Sciences, Innovation and Sustainability Research at the University of Graz. Targeted educational work on climate change issues is necessary, the researchers say.
For their study, which has just been published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, the researchers analysed the responses given by around 500 Austrians to an online survey. The respondents were a representative sample of men and women aged between 18 and 72 years old, spread across all the federal states of Austria, half of them with the “Matura” school leaving qualification and half without.
“In our survey we asked ten questions on climate change, to be answered with ‘true’ or ‘false’, and asked people to estimate how certain they were of their own answers, on a scale from 50% (guessing) to 100% (absolutely certain/confident),” Brudermann explains.
The results of the survey show that most Austrians evidently overestimate their own knowledge about climate change. For instance, 84 percent of those surveyed think that water vapour is not a greenhouse gas, and were on average around 80 percent certain about this. A similar picture emerged on the question of whether the ozone hole is the main cause of the greenhouse effect. 60 percent replied “true”, which is incorrect, although the survey participants were on average around 81 percent certain about this.
There were only slight differences regarding gender, age and education level. It does seem that overconfidence in people’s own knowledge about climate change increases slightly with age. Men answered more questions correctly, on average, and were slightly more confident than women.
People generally tend to filter the wide range of available information and select the parts that confirm their beliefs. “The combination of incomplete knowledge and overconfidence can become a serious problem when distortions in reality lead to people making the wrong decisions,” Brudermann points out, particularly with reference to climate protection. He cites an example: “Anyone who denies the role of humans in global warming, arguing that there have been repeated natural climate fluctuations in the past, is unlikely to accept countermeasures that involve restrictions in their own lives.”
Publication
"You know nothing, John Doe" – Judgmental overconfidence in lay climate knowledge
Annina Thaller, Thomas Brudermann
Journal of Environmental Psychology 69 (2020) 101427, doi: 10.1016/j.jenvp.2020.101427
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Education to combat climate change
To counteract these factors, the researchers agree that targeted educational work is needed. At the University of Graz a new course will begin in autumn as a free elective module: interested students can develop a basic scientific understanding of climate change and the principles of communication, as part of a traineeship programme. The aim is to provide students with the scientific and didactic knowledge they need to support schools in climate and sustainability projects. The course is part of the joint project “makingAchange”, which is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research, and led by the Climate Change Center Austria (CCCA) and aims to develop links between schools and the research sector.
