How Psychological Distance shapes Americans’ Climate Change Preferences: a Conjoint Analysis

Paper presentation at the Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA) Annual Conference, April 2025. With Wei Wang and Wei-Ting Tsai.

Abstract: How does the psychological distance of natural disasters influence climate attitudes? Existing work that applies construal level theory (CLT) to study climate perceptions reports mixed effects, precluding clear messaging guidance for climate change communicators. We argue that prior experimental evidence mostly does not test distance dimensions independently, despite CLT being a multidimensional theory comprising social, spatial, temporal, and probabilistic distance. We contribute a systematic test by independently manipulating each distance dimension via a preregistered conjoint experiment about floods. Study 1 recruited 700 Republicans, finding that socially proximate natural disasters that affect one’s ingroup consistently increase pro-climate attitudes, while spatial, temporal, and probabilistic distance generally do not have a significant effect. Highlighting the impacts of climate on social ingroups can increase Republicans’ pro-climate attitudes by up to 5 percentage points.