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We examine how people remember stories about climate change and how they communicate these stories to others. Drawing on theories of reconstructive memory and cultural theory, we assume that recollection is systematically affected by an individual's world view as well as by the world view of the target audience. In an experimental study with a Norwegian representative sample (N = 266), participants read a story about three politicians, in which each protagonist was described as holding a specific world view and as trying to tackle climate change with a corresponding strategy (individualistic/free market oriented, hierarchical/technology-oriented, or egalitarian/sustainability-oriented). After 1 day and then after 1 week, participants were asked to retell the story as if to somebody who was characterized as being either an individualist, a hierarchist, or an egalitarian; in addition, a neutral recall control condition without a specified audience was included. Participants' own world view was assessed and they were classified as endorsing individualism, or hierarchism, or egalitarianism. We hypothesized that retellings would be selectively reconstructed according to the world view of the participant, as well as tuned to the audience's world view. We assessed the cognitive structure of the recollected story, and, using methods from computational text analysis, we computed similarities among retellings and the original narrative, and among retellings and world views. Results suggest that (i) retellings become less accurate over time, (ii) retelling to an audience with an explicit world view leads to more strongly filtered retellings than recalling without a specified audience, but the filter operates in a non-specific manner with respect to world views, (iii) the cognitive structure of the recollected story shows small but systematic differences concerning the link between story problem and solution as a function of the participant's and the audience's world view. No interaction was found between the world view of ...

We examine how people remember stories about climate change and how they communicate these stories to others. Drawing on theories of reconstructive memory and cultural theory, we assume that recollection is systematically affected by an individual's world view as well as by the world view of the target audience. In an experimental study with a Norwegian representative sample (N = 266), participants read a story about three politicians, in which each protagonist was described as holding a specific world view and as trying to tackle climate change with a corresponding strategy (individualistic/free market oriented, hierarchical/technology-oriented, or egalitarian/sustainability-oriented). After 1 day and then after 1 week, participants were asked to retell the story as if to somebody who was characterized as being either an individualist, a hierarchist, or an egalitarian; in addition, a neutral recall control condition without a specified audience was included. Participants' own world view was assessed and they were classified as endorsing individualism, or hierarchism, or egalitarianism. We hypothesized that retellings would be selectively reconstructed according to the world view of the participant, as well as tuned to the audience's world view. We assessed the cognitive structure of the recollected story, and, using methods from computational text analysis, we computed similarities among retellings and the original narrative, and among retellings and world views. Results suggest that (i) retellings become less accurate over time, (ii) retelling to an audience with an explicit world view leads to more strongly filtered retellings than recalling without a specified audience, but the filter operates in a non-specific manner with respect to world views, (iii) the cognitive structure of the recollected story shows small but systematic differences concerning the link between story problem and solution as a function of the participant's and the audience's world view. No interaction was found between the world view of the participant and that of the audience. Results emphasize the role of world views in communicating climate change, and might help to better understand phenomena such as polarization and echo chamber effects. ; publishedVersion

This paper investigates how the notion of future is represented in a large corpus of English-language blogs related to climate change, with an overarching interest in exploring to what extent the perspectives of gloom-and-doom versus more positive perspectives of a sustainable society are represented. We address the following questions: (1) How are representations of the future expressed linguistically in public debates related to climate change? (2) What meanings do the representations convey? Our principal contribution is a set of nine meaning categories that characterize different representations of the future: the categories were derived by following a corpus-assisted discourse analysis approach. Within these categories, the large presence of characterisations related to sustainability, as well as frequent positive value-laden characterisations, are noteworthy. Representa- tions reflect various perspectives of a future for humanity, for nature, and for countries as well as for economies. Further, we have found that when climate change is viewed as a threat, it is in relation to nature, humans and security, while it is seen as an opportunity for growth in business and industry. The results provide knowledge on how people conceive the possible impacts of global climate and environmental change within two broad perspectives of a ''gloom-and-doom'' versus a ''bright'' future. This may contribute to an improved basis for political decision making on measures in order to avoid dangerous consequences as well as to encourage engagement in the shift toward a low-carbon future. ; acceptedVersion