Understanding environmental attitudes and disentangling their antecedents can inform effective public policy coping with environmental risks. Two key environmental issues are nuclear energy and climate change. Many people believe that nuclear energy will remain an important component of the overall energy mix for some time to come. Prior research on public environmental attitudes show that nuclear power invokes highly negative responses for many people. However, it is commonly found in studies that compared how nuclear experts and laypeople assess nuclear energy risks, that the experts rate issues such as the disposal of radioactive waste, the misuse of radioactive materials and nuclear testing as less risky than laypeople. On the other hand, work on environmental attitudes of climate change, a group of 750 experts chose climate change as the biggest potential threat to the world economy in 2016; they hold positive attitudes towards policy to ameliorate the effects of climate change, while public opinion is still equivocal. Only 42% of them know that most scientists agree, and nearly 75% engage with climate issues on a low level. This project will explore these differences in environmental risk attitudes, as well as its underlying mechanism.
The research questions are: How is power associated with risk attitudes, what is the role of identity and self-efficacy, and what is the role of social characteristics are associated with power? Is there a significant difference in identity and self-efficacy between high power holders and low power holders? Does identity mediate the relationship between power and self-efficacy? Does self-efficacy mediate the relationship between identity and risk attitudes toward nuclear energy and climate change? Do identify and self-efficacy mediate and/or moderate the relationship between power and risk attitudes? Do key demographics moderate any of the effects indicated in RQs 1-5?
