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Category: Project

Description: Despite the dire predictions regarding the consequences of climate change century (International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2019), today’s societies are still sluggish when it comes to climate action and public opinion on climate change has become increasingly polarized (Right-wing conservatives tend to find climate action less important than left-wing liberals), with people sorting themselves into opposed camps, and discussions growing emotional – not only in the US (Dunlap and McCright 2008; Dunlap, McCright, and Yarosh 2016; McCright and Dunlap 2011) but also throughout Europe (McCright, Dunlap, and Marquart-Pyatt 2016). This widening gap in public opinion sweeps away common ground and renders compromise difficult. The goal of this project is to evaluate whether, how and to what extent a short mindfulness-based intervention can help establish common political ground from which effective and commonly accepted climate change mitigation policies can emerge. Dispositional and induced mindfulness have the potential to overcome polarization in the context of climate change. Research in psychology has repeatedly shown that mindfulness has the consequence to increase compassion with oneself and others. Hence, mindfulness may therefore change the affective reactions to people with opposing political views. Mindfulness may allow people to listen to their political opponents’ opinions and arguments on climate action which they emotionally rejected beforehand, leading to a more constructive debate and solution-oriented process. Our project introduces secular mindfulness to political science and will investigate the impact of being and becoming mindful on both climate change attitudes and behavior conducting a survey experiment in the US.