Mark Hurlstone

Climate change will have dangerous impacts on future generations. Accordingly, people in the present have an obligation to make sacrifices for the benefit of future others. However, research on temporal and social discounting shows that people are short-sighted and selfish—they prefer immediate over delayed benefits, and they prefer benefits for themselves over others. Discounting over long-term time horizons is known as intergenerational discounting, and is a major obstacle to climate action. Here, we examine whether persuasive messages that activate the legacy motive—the desire to build a positive legacy—can increase the willingness of current actors to make sacrifices for future generations. Using a climate change public goods game, we find that when the benefits of cooperation accrue to decision makers in the present, high levels of cooperation are sustained, whereas when the benefits accrue to future generations, intergenerational discounting makes cooperation elusive. Crucially, when the legacy motive is activated—by promoting death awareness, feelings of power asymmetry, and intergenerational reciprocity—intergenerational discounting is attenuated, and cooperation is restored. Our results suggest climate action can be fostered by framing climate change as an intergenerational dilemma, and by crafting persuasive messages that activate people’s drive to leave a positive legacy.

Inaction on climate change is often linked to the idea that climate change is perceived as a distant problem. In this thesis I have developed a model describing why some people feel distant from climate change, why some people feel close, and how perceptions of distance might be shifted. I have presented an analysis of how psychological distance from climate change might be overcome, through building connections between climate change and objects of care, with the use of increasingly informal, intimate methods of communication, and an expansion of social involvement from the general public.

The public perception of climate change as abstract and distant may undermine climate action. According to construal level theory, whether a phenomenon is perceived as psychologically distant or close is associated with whether it is construed as abstract or concrete, respectively. Previous work has established a link between psychological distance and climate action, but the associated role of construal level has yet to be explored in depth. In two representative surveys of Australians (N = 217 and N = 216), and one experiment (N = 319), we tested whether construal level and psychological distance from climate change predicted pro-environmental intentions and policy support, and whether manipulating distance and construal increased proenvironmental behaviours such as donations. Results showed that psychological closeness to climate change predicted more engagement in pro-environmental behaviours, while construal level produced inconsistent results, and manipulations of both variables failed to produce increases in pro-environmental behaviours. In contrast with the central tenet of construal level theory, construal level was unrelated to psychological distance in all three studies. Our findings suggest that the hypothesised relationship between construal level and psychological distance may not hold in the context of climate change, and that it may be difficult to change proenvironmental behaviour by manipulating these variables.

Rationale: Childhood vaccination is a safe and effective way of reducing infectious diseases. Yet, public confidence in vaccination is waning, driven in part by the ‘manufacture of doubt’ by anti-vaccination activists and websites. However, there is little research examining the psychological underpinnings of anti-vaccination rhetoric among parents. Objectives: Here, we examined the structure and moral roots of anti-vaccination attitudes amongst Australian parents active on social media parenting sites. Methods: Participants (N = 296) completed questionnaires assessing their vaccination attitudes, behavioural intentions, and moral preferences. Results: Using Latent Profile Analysis, we identified three profiles (i.e., groups), interpretable as vaccine “accepters”, “fence sitters”, and “rejecters”, each characterised by a distinct pattern of vaccination attitudes and moral preferences. Accepters exhibited positive vaccination attitudes and strong intentions to vaccinate; rejecters exhibited the opposite pattern of responses; whilst fence sitters exhibited an intermediate pattern of responses. Compared to accepters, rejecters and fence sitters exhibited a heightened moral preference for liberty (belief in the rights of the individual) and harm (concern about the wellbeing of others). Compared to acceptors and fence sitters, rejecters exhibited a heightened moral preference for purity (an abhorrence for impurity of body), and a diminished moral preference for authority (deference to those in positions of power). Conclusion: Given the sensitivity of fence sitters and rejecters to liberty-related moral concerns, our research cautions against the use of adversarial approaches—e.g., No Jab, No Pay legislation—that promote vaccination uptake by restricting parental freedoms, as they may backfire amongst parents ambivalent toward vaccination.

To qualitative researchers, social media offers a novel opportunity to harvest a massive and diverse range of content, without the need for intrusive or intensive data collection procedures. However, performing a qualitative analysis across a massive social media data set is cumbersome and impractical. Instead, researchers often extract a subset of content to analyze, but a framework to facilitate this process is currently lacking. We present a four-phased framework for improving this extraction process, which blends the capacities of data science techniques to compress large data sets into smaller spaces, with the capabilities of qualitative analysis to address research questions. We demonstrate this framework by investigating the topics of Australian Twitter commentary on climate change, using quantitative (Non-Negative Matrix inter-joint Factorization; Topic Alignment) and qualitative (Thematic Analysis) techniques. Our approach is useful for researchers seeking to perform qualitative analyses of social media, or researchers wanting to supplement their quantitative work with a qualitative analysis of broader social context and meaning.