Engaging diverse audiences with climate change: message strategies for Global Warming’s Six Americas

Introduction Global climate change is an environmental threat of the gravest magnitude, recognized by virtually the entire climate science community. Among Americans, however, it remains a divisive issue, with large segments of the population discounting or ignoring the threat. To build public understanding and issue engagement, climate change communicators must recognize and respond to these varied points-of-view: Messages are unlikely to be effective if a diverse population is treated as a homogeneous mass. In this chapter, we discuss climate change communication strategies in light of the informationprocessing propensities of Global Warming’s Six Americas-six unique audience segments that perceive and respond to the issue in distinct ways. The Six Americas range across a spectrum of concern and issue engagement, from the Alarmed, who are very concerned about the issue and support aggressive action to reduce it, to the Dismissive, who do not believe it is real or a problem (Figure 31.1). Between these two extremes are four other groups-the Concerned, Cautious, Disengaged, and Doubtful-that vary in their issue concern, certainty, behavioral responses, and policy support. The groups were first identified in a 2008 nationally representative survey using latent class analysis, and have been tracked since then with bi-annual surveys. They are strongly associated with a range of characteristics, including climate and energy beliefs and policy preferences; political ideology and party identification; cultural values; political efficacy; and consumer and political behavior (see Maibach et al., 2009, 2011; and reports posted on our websites: http://climatechange.gmu.edu and http://environment. yale.edu/climate-communication/). Developed to assist climate change communicators, the segmentation is being used by government agencies, informal science educators, and media organizations. To date, publications describing the segments have been largely descriptive, detailing the beliefs, behaviors, and characteristics of each group. There are, however, two theoretical dimensions underlying the Six Americas-attitudinal valence and issue involvement (Figure 31.2)—which link the segmentation to well-developed literatures on persuasion, information-processing, science and risk communication, and opinion leadership, suggesting a wealth of communication strategies for reaching and influencing the Six Americas. Attitudinal valence is defined here as the inclination to accept or reject the science of climate change, and is assessed with several key beliefs: Climate change is occurring; it is harmful; humans are causing it; humanscan reduce it; and scientists agree on its reality and human causes. These beliefs have been shown to predict support for national action on the issue and for mitigation policies, as well as political activism (Krosnick et al., 2006; Ding et al., 2011; Lewandowsky et al., 2013; Roser-Renouf et al., 2014). Issue involvement refers to cognitive and affective issue engagement, and is assessed in terms of the amount of thought devoted to the issue and attitudinal certainty. Both the Alarmed and Dismissive think about the issue and are certain of their opinions, but the Alarmed are likely to accept all the key beliefs and are predisposed to accept messages that are consistent with the science, while the Dismissive reject the key beliefs and are predisposed to reject and counter-argue these same messages. The remaining four segments, currently comprising about 70 percent of the U.S. population, have lower issue involvement and greater uncertainty regarding the reality, dangers, and causes of climateFigure 31.1 Global Warming’s Six AmericasSource: Yale/George Mason University.