Measuring worries about climate change: the effect of a subtle wording change

Summary

Insight into public attitudes toward climate change requires accurate and consistent survey tools. The Understanding Society study asks respondents to what extent they agree that “The effects of climate change are too far in the future to worry me.” The phrasing “worry me” may prompt respondents to put relatively much weight on personal costs of climate change as opposed to societal costs, which we illustrate with a simple framework. We design and implement a survey experiment in which respondents are randomly assigned either to the original “worry me” question or to a version that replaces “worry me” with “worry about”. We find that reported climate change worries are on average significantly higher among the latter. This effect is mainly driven by the oldest age group, which can be explained by their expected shorter exposure to future climate change impacts. Results suggest that environmental attitude measures are sensitive to formulation details. We discuss the implications for the interpretation of previously collected data and for future research design.