Climate, Morals, and Politics

Background: It is well established that conservative political attitudes are predictive of scepticism towards the reality and anthropomorphic origin of climate change. First, conservatism is not a homogenous psychological variable and differs between national cultures. Second, according to the Moral Foundations Theory, there are basic modules analysing social triggers automatically and intuitively. These modules, accord-ingly, shape political attitudes and the processing of facts. Objectives and Research questions: The first objective of the present study is to investigate how political conservative attitudes in Germany and psychological variables such as personal trust, moral values, social dominance, and system justifi-cation are related to scepticism towards climate change. Further, conservative attitudes could semantically lead to attitudes and intentions aimed at conserving humans’ natural environment. The second objective is to use cluster analysis to potentially identify sub-groups of conservative persons which are low in scepticism. The third objective is to differentiate atti-tudes towards global climate change from attitudes towards the perseveration of regional/national na-ture. Participants: A panel (bilendi & respondi, London, UK) were commissioned to collect a sample of German partici-pants (N ca. 1600). The questionnaire was sent via an anonymous, non-personal link. Study method: Participants are asked to complete an online survey using the moral foundations questionnaire (Gra-ham et al., 2011) including the liberty scale (Iyer et al., 2012), social dominance orientation (Jim Sidanius & Felicia Pratto, 1999), system justification (Kay & Jost, 2013) and several social and political questions based on the European Value Survey (EVS) 2017 (Balakireva, 2021). The questions drawn from the EVS are grouped into the topics trust, attitudes towards climate change, and different dimen-sions of conservatism: economic conservatism, nationalism, religiosity, and social conventionalism. Attitudes towards preserving regional/national nature are measured using a convenience instrument.