Mitigation system threat and its effects on climate change beliefs among Australians

Despite overwhelming scientific evidence and consensus surrounding humanity’s role in climate change, many still deny these scientific conclusions. Understanding why some still deny climate change and its impacts is critical to developing communication and advocacy approaches that persuade people of the need to address this global issue. Prior research has shown that one of the most influential factors on climate change denial is political ideology, primarily right-wing ideology (Hornsey, Harris, Bain, & Fielding, 2016). However, little is known as to why right-wing adherents are more likely to deny climate change, particularly in the Australian socio-political context (Unsworth & Fielding, 2014). Given right-wing adherents are highly sensitive to threat (Feygina, Jost, & Goldsmith, 2010), one possibility is that government policies commonly proposed to mitigate climate change pose threats to (a) the socioeconomic system (i.e. market-based economics and the unimpeded use of fossil fuels for energy), as well as (b) the sociocultural system (i.e. threats to the Australian way of life such as unimpeded land resource use, and beef consumption). This study is a partial replication of a similar study conducted with U.S. participants (Clarke, Ling, Kothe, Klas & Richardson, 2019) which examined the mediating role of climate change mitigation threat on the relationships between Right-Wing Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation subfactors on types of climate change denial (existence, human cause, impact, and climate science denial). This study will extend upon this work by examining the role of two different types of mitigation threat in socioeconomic and sociocultural mitigation threat. Furthermore, given the current COVID-19 crisis and how this may affect attention to and perceptions of climate change and associated policies, an extension on this work is to control for some key COVID-19 variables such as the perceived threat of Coronavirus, support for government measures to slow the spread of the virus, and news consumption relating to the virus.