The role of perceived powerlessness and other barriers to climate action
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The impacts of anthropogenic climate change are rapidly worsening, but current efforts to mitigate this crisis are insufficient. Therefore, it is critically important to understand how to motivate more individuals to take action to protect against future climate change impacts. This study examines the individual‐level factors that predict motivations to act, as well as potential barriers to action in a sample of Canadian adults. Participants completed a questionnaire that assessed a) demographics; b) climate change knowledge, opinions, and scepticism; and c) psychological factors that may impede action. The responses were analyzed to determine the factors that explain whether individuals would change their actions in light of climate change and to what extent climate change considerations impact their actions. Predictors of action included how informed individuals were about climate change, perceived severity of its effects, perceived urgency to act, and climate change scepticism. The strongest predictor was perceived powerlessness; individuals who felt a sense of powerlessness were less likely to change their actions and reported that the threat of climate change had less influence over their behaviours. Powerlessness in turn was associated with age and political affiliation. Implications of these findings, and possible solutions to overcome the barrier of perceived powerlessness, are discussed .
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".