title: Past-focused environmental comparisons promote proenvironmental outcomes for conservatives.
abstract: Conservatives appear more skeptical about climate change and global warming and less willing to act against it than liberals. We propose that this unwillingness could result from fundamental differences in conservatives' and liberals' temporal focus. Conservatives tend to focus more on the past than do liberals. Across six studies, we rely on this notion to demonstrate that conservatives are positively affected by past- but not by future-focused environmental comparisons. Past comparisons largely eliminated the political divide that separated liberal and conservative respondents' attitudes toward and behavior regarding climate change, so that across these studies conservatives and liberals were nearly equally likely to fight climate change. This research demonstrates how psychological processes, such as temporal comparison, underlie the prevalent ideological gap in addressing climate change. It opens up a promising avenue to convince conservatives effectively of the need to address climate change and global warming.
authors.affiliation: Social Cognition Center Cologne, University of Cologne, 50931 Cologne, Germany mbaldwin@uni-koeln.de.
authors.forename: Matthew
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Baldwin
authors.affiliation: Social Cognition Center Cologne, University of Cologne, 50931 Cologne, Germany.
authors.forename: Joris
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Lammers
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001290:Attitude; D057231:Climate Change; D005260:Female; D057232:Global Warming; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D008297:Male; D009014:Morals; D011057:Politics; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D013997:Time Factors; D014481:United States; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: attitudes; climate change; framing; political ideology; temporal comparison