Abstract
Both COVID-19 and climate change are collective problems which require collective actions to form a portion of the response. In New Zealand, collective action was successfully used to pursue an elimination strategy against COVID-19, with high levels of support and compliance, even for intrusive and disruptive requirements, such as changing work patterns, travel restrictions, and social isolation. Yet, there have not been similar levels of support and participation in collective climate action (CCA), even though a high proportion of New Zealanders agree that climate change is an urgent concern. I therefore set out to discover whether messaging about collective action against COVID-19 would motivate wider participation in CCA.
A survey of New Zealand residents (n = 842) was used to perform a simple controlled experiment with three conditions. The first was a narrative essay attributing New Zealand’s success against COVID-19 to collective action. The essay was transformed into a series of Likert-style questions for the second condition; the third condition had no additional task, forming the control. Participants were randomly assigned to one of the tasks, and thereafter answered scale questions about their perceptions of collective efficacy (PCE) in general, belief in climate change, and their impressions of CCA. Participants were also able to answer open-ended questions, providing qualitative richness to the data collected.
The results show that the relationship between PCE and CCA intentions is mediated by efficacy beliefs relating to the specific issue at hand. Two measures of perceived climate efficacy correlated with PCE, suggesting that perceptions of collective efficacy and climate efficacy are related. Further, both climate efficacy measures also correlated very strongly with CCA intentions, despite the fact that PCE did not. This implies that the relationship between PCE and CCA intentions is indirect and mediated by climate efficacy.
The essay, but not the questions, increased PCE by 7%, suggesting that narrative about New Zealand’s COVID-19 response has the ability to increase confidence in the power of collective action in general. Neither the essay nor the questions had an impact on the mean CCA intention scores. However, the overall relationship between PCE and CCA intentions was significantly different, such that individuals with high PCE in the essay and questions group had higher CCA intentions than those with high PCE in the control. This demonstrates that while there was not a general effect across the sample, the communications were impactful for certain groups of people.
The effects of the communication interventions varied between different demographic groups. People with left-leaning political views showed a 5% higher belief in the effectiveness of collective action after reading the essay, compared to those with similar beliefs in the control. Meanwhile, there was no effect of either the essay or the questions on PCE for right-leaning participants. This contrast demonstrates that different communication methods vary in their potential to influence public opinion on politicised science-based issues across the political spectrum. Yet there were no significant differences in CCA intentions or either climate efficacy measure on the basis of political orientations, suggesting that climate-related beliefs and intentions are so strongly related to political orientation that a simple communication intervention is unlikely to make a difference.
In addition, across all groups, younger participants (age 16-25) had 15% higher intentions to participate in CCA compared to older participants (age 66-75). This reflects the different relationships that old and young generations have to both collective action and climate change with younger people more likely to turn to collective means of addressing the climate crisis. However, these relationships were not significantly altered by either the essay or the questions. Other demographic groups did not have a consistent difference in any of the variables, aside from the notable exception that women had higher CCA intentions than men, regardless of the communications treatment they received.
This thesis demonstrates that belief in the effectiveness of collective action is issue-dependent and those beliefs do not transfer clearly between unrelated issues. The practical implications are that communicators wishing to inspire greater confidence in CCA may have greater influence if they use examples of successful climate collective action rather than examples of collective action in general. Follow up studies could test this with variations of the narrative essay that draw explicit comparisons between collective action in two different contexts, rather than leaving readers to draw their own conclusions.