Social Norms and the Threat of Climate Change: An Agent-Based Model to Investigate Pro-Environmental Behaviour

How people react towards threatening information such as climate change is a non-trivial matter. While people with a high environmental self-identity tend to react approach-motivated by engaging in pro-environmental behaviour, people of low environmental self-identity may exhibit proximal defence behaviour, by avoiding and distracting themselves from potentially threatening stimuli caused by identified anxious thoughts and circumstances. This psychological theory has recently been tested in experimental studies in which results suggest that the promotion of climate change information can also backfire. Based on these findings, we propose an agent-based model to address influences on anxiety and correlated pro-environmental actions in relation to societal norms of climate change scepticism and environmental self-identity.