By Steve Lemeshko

A woman walks with her starving donkey. Climate change wreaks havoc on the livelihoods of communities in the Somali region. Credit: UNICEF Ethiopia, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Climate change is not just one of humanity’s most urgent crises—it’s also one of its biggest communication challenges. Before meaningful large-scale progress can happen, the public must understand and engage with the issue, but this understanding and engagement are frequently obstructed by cognitive biases.

Today, the divide between the scientific community and the public is a significant barrier. Despite 97% of climate scientists agreeing that human-induced climate change is happening, public understanding lags significantly. According to the Spring 2024 Climate Change in the American Mind: Beliefs & Attitudes report, only 59% of Americans believe climate change is primarily human-caused. Even fewer—just 21%—are aware that over 90% of climate scientists share this consensus.

This gap can at least partly be explained by cognitive biases—mental shortcuts that influence how people process information—and ineffective communication strategies. Jiaying Zhao and Yu Luo’s study, “A framework to address cognitive biases of climate change” (2021), provides one of the most comprehensive analyses of these biases and “debiasing tools,” i.e., practical solutions.

Key biases shaping climate change perception include:

Attentional bias: Information is processed selectively, often filtered by political orientation. For example, eye-tracking studies show individuals selectively focus on specific words or parts of the graphs and interpret graphs and data depending on their worldview.
Confirmation bias: Looking for information that supports existing beliefs while ignoring evidence that challenges them.
Perceptual bias: Misjudging what others believe. This includes assuming more ingroup support or outgroup opposition to climate policies than actually exists, further polarizing climate change.
Present bias: Focusing on tasks that are closer in time and space. Climate change becomes an outlier.
Pseudoinefficacy: Believing individual actions don’t matter because the problem feels too overwhelming. This perspective is often reinforced by climate change messaging that emphasizes large-scale action and dismisses personal efforts.
Recall bias: Downplaying the severity of past climate-related events, leading to skepticism about future risks.
Single-action bias: Thinking that taking one action, like recycling, is “enough,” reducing perceived urgency to do more.
Status quo bias: Resisting change, even when necessary.

Zhao and Luo propose practical tools to counter these biases, making climate communication effective:

Default: Making climate-friendly choices the default reduces effort and resistance to change and increases participation. For example, countries with opt-out organ donation policies have far higher registration rates than those with opt-in systems.
Forward-looking: Shifting the focus to the legacy left for future generations or the benefits of forward-thinking policies can inspire action.
Framing: Aligning messages with people’s ideologies and values increases engagement. For instance, a field experiment targeting conservatives with climate education campaigns framed around economic benefits, national security, faith, and conservative principles significantly improved their understanding of climate change.
Identity and value reinforcement: Connecting climate action to personal identity and core values encourages engagement.
Inoculation: Protecting people from misinformation is key. Forewarning them about potential false claims and providing preemptive refutations serves as a “vaccine” to disinformation efforts, sometimes intentionally done by the Big Oil industry.
Observational learning: Watching others adopt climate-friendly behaviors—whether peers or examples in videos—normalizes and spreads such actions.
Reconstruction: Correcting misconceptions about group beliefs is another approach. Misjudging social norms often amplifies climate inaction. Communicating accurate views of both in-group and out-group members on climate change—or encouraging discussions with a diverse group of peers—helps people gain a more realistic understanding. Essentially, everyone becomes a science communicator.
Visualization: Infographics, photography, and art make abstract concepts like human contributions to climate change more accessible and memorable.

Arguably, one of the most effective strategies to integrate these tools is narrative empathy—telling personal, relatable stories that show, rather than explain, the impacts of climate change. Data from the Beliefs & Attitudes report shows that seeing others experience climate change or experiencing them firsthand correlates most strongly with opinion change. Below is the graph showing different variables tested in the study:

Correlations between predictors and climate change beliefs. Credit: (Leiserowitz et al.)

Stories about identifiable individuals or specific successes resonate more deeply than statistics ever could. By focusing on one story at a time, we create emotional connections that inspire action. For example, the image of Alan Kurdi, a Syrian toddler who drowned while fleeing violence, humanized the refugee crisis and spurred European compassion toward refugees. Similarly, public outcry over Peanut, the squirrel who died death at the hands of regulatory enforcement, Pale Male, the red-tailed hawk evicted from his NYC nest, and Hokget, the terrier stranded on an oil tanker, shows how each story captured public attention and compassion in a way that statistics could not.

When people see the human—or animal—face of suffering, the abstract becomes tangible, and the overwhelming becomes actionable. Such narratives counteract two significant barriers to large-scale action: psychic numbing (desensitization to large-scale suffering) and pseudoinefficacy (feeling that individual actions don’t matter). We can use the power of human compassion to our advantage in mobilizing support for climate change.

By applying Zhao and Luo’s strategies, together with the power of narrative empathy, we can shift climate change from an abstract, polarizing issue into one people feel compelled to act on. One story at a time, we can build the collective will to act—because behind every statistic is a life, and behind every life is a story waiting to be told.

The full citations of the article and report are:

Leiserowitz, Anthony, et al. Climate Change in the American Mind: Beliefs & Attitudes, Spring 2024. Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, 16 July 2024, https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/climate-change-in-the-american-mind-beliefs-attitudes-spring-2024/.

Zhao, Jiaying, and Yu Luo. “A framework to address cognitive biases of climate change.” Neuron, vol. 109, no. 22, Nov. 2021, pp. 3548–3551, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2021.08.029.

For further reading on climate change communication, see the following articles:

Artistic Depictions of Climate Change Challenging Politicization / August 28, 2023

Hurricane Ida and The Need for Better Climate Communication / September 3, 2021

Cognitive Bias Prevents Us from Tackling Climate Change / February 22, 2019

Overcoming Cognitive Bias and Bridging the Climate Change Communication Gap