Publication type
Journal Article
Authors
Publication date
August 1, 2026
Summary:
Insight into public attitudes toward climate change requires accurate and consistent survey tools. The Understanding Society study asks respondents to what extent they agree that “The effects of climate change are too far in the future to worry me.” The phrasing “worry me” may prompt respondents to put relatively much weight on personal costs of climate change as opposed to societal costs, which we illustrate with a simple framework. We design and implement a survey experiment in which respondents are randomly assigned either to the original “worry me” question or to a version that replaces “worry me” with “worry about”. We find that reported climate change worries are on average significantly higher among the latter. This effect is mainly driven by the oldest age group, which can be explained by their expected shorter exposure to future climate change impacts. Results suggest that environmental attitude measures are sensitive to formulation details. We discuss the implications for the interpretation of previously collected data and for future research design.
Published in
Journal of Economic Psychology
Volume
Volume: 115:102904
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2026.102904
ISSN
01674870
Subjects
Notes
Open Access
Under a Creative Commons license
© 2026 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.
Code: The Understanding Society data used in this paper is available through the UK Data Service upon (free) registration via https://beta.ukdataservice.ac.uk/datacatalogue/studies/study?id=6849. The code used to prepare our dataset and replicate our output can be downloaded through https://github.com/liekevoorintholt/JoEP_CC_worries_wording
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