Dataset associated with Framing Climate Uncertainty: Frame Choices Reveal and Influence Climate Change Beliefs

Abstract

We investigated in two pre-registered studies (1) how 'communicators' verbally frame a confidence interval regarding projected change in winter precipitation due to climate change (N = 512, speakers2.RData). We assessed this by asking study participants to choose one of two different verbal frames for communicating the above projection (a ‘concerned’ compared to an ‘unconcerned’ frame). Using a five-item scale, we measured their perceived severity of consequences of this projection (including health, financial and property losses and one general severity item) as main predictor, and environmental values (New Ecological Paradigm-scale by Dunlap et al., 2000), political affiliation (7-point scale ranging from ‘strong democrat’ to ‘strong republican’), levels of numeracy (using the adaptive version of the Berlin Numeracy Test, BNT, Cokely et al., 2012), age, gender, and levels of education. We studied further (2) how ‘listeners’ interpret the two different verbal frames (N = 385, listener2.RData). Listeners were randomly allocated to two different experimental groups. As main dependent variable, we measured their perceived severity of consequences of precipitation change, and as covariates environmental values, levels of numeracy, and demographic variables, all as described for study 1. Samples for both studies were recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk in spring 2017. Answers of participants were collected using the survey software Unipark. Both studies were preregistered at the Open Science Framework, and all materials and measures used can be found at osf.io/3tr4h. The R-Code used for analysing the study results is stored in the .R-files models_speakers_replicationApril2017.R and models_listeners_replicationApril2017.R.