Americans underestimate real concern about climate

Leaders and changemakers may be better positioned than they think to push forward with transformative climate policies, according to a new study published by Nature Communications. 

Researchers have found that the majority of Americans perceive that national concern about climate change and support for mitigating policies is significantly lower than it actually is. 

This “false social reality”, the study says, means that supporters of climate policies outnumber opponents two to one, while Americans falsely perceive nearly the opposite to be true. The authors set out a number of explanations for this, including the impacts of media, political parties and demographic variations.

The paper, titled ‘Americans experience a false social reality by underestimating popular climate policy support by nearly half’, shows that 80-90% of those surveyed underestimated the prevalence of support for major climate change mitigation policies and climate concern. 

While 66-80% support these policies, Americans believe support for these policies to be just 37–43% on average. The data showed that people in every state and every assessed demographic underestimated support across all polices tested.

The authors note that the coordination of collective solutions may be hampered, if people fail to accurately perceive that others are concerned and support taking action.