Is Personal Experience an Effective Teacher? The Effect of Going through a Hurricane on Climate Perceptions and Beliefs

Abstract

Since we, as individuals, cannot perceive climate change directly, as it is a statistical concept, we instead employ attribute substitution, relying on proxies such as our personal experiences of local weather and extreme weather events to understand the larger and less comprehensible nature of climate change. The hypothesis for this thesis was twofold; we expected that natural disasters would cause significant change to the climate change perceptions of those affected by the extreme weather event, as victims would be influenced by their emotional responses to extreme weather and express far more concern about climate change and global warming. Because emotional responses are transient and decay over time, we predicted that concern would fade as more time passed since the disaster. Predicting such a fade was grounded in an understanding of cognitive myopia, defined as the overweighting of one’s immediate surroundings both temporally and geographically. We employ a large-scale survey in two locations to test this hypothesis, asking Houston residents about Hurricane Harvey and New Jersey residents about Hurricane Sandy. The five-year window between the two storms allowed for the investigation of the predicted fade. The data confirmed the predicted increase in concern compared to national averages; however, despite seeing clear fades in frequency and intensity of respondents’ memories of their experience with the storm, the emotional fade did not translate into a fade in concern about climate change. Houston and New Jersey respondents expressed similarly heightened concern, thus indicating a permanence to the alterations in perceptions of climate change and global warming.