The effects of communicating climate change threat: mobilizing anger and authoritarian affect displacement

Research on climate change communication has made important contributions to our understanding of how to effectively inform and mobilize the public for climate action and yet open questions remain, not least because existing results are at times inconclusive or incomplete. The climate crisis poses an existential threat. But what effect does communicating that threat have? To what degree can communicating the threat invoke anger and how does anger interact with individual values predispositions? In this study, we conducted a survey experiment (N = 570) to better understand effects of communicating climate change threat. We find that exposure to climate change threat makes people angrier, and anger makes them more willing to act on climate change mitigation, confirming previous findings. However, our study adds a novel insight, the findings do not apply to people with authoritarian predispositions. They display lower levels of anger and willingness to act, while exposure to climate change threat results in increased authoritarian attitudes. This suggests that climate change threat can lead to affect displacement in people with authoritarian predispositions, where anger (typically directed at those in power, who have failed to tackle climate change) is redirected at non-conforming groups.