However, relatively few Americans engage in political actionsto limit global warming, such as signing petitions, volunteering, or contacting government officials. While majorities think that global warming should be a high government priority and support various climate policies, there is a discrepancy between the public’s attitudes about climate action and their behaviors or actions that support it. Research that offers insights into this “attitude-behavior gap” can identify opportunities to reduce the gap and thereby strengthen both public and political will. In this analysis, we investigate the attitude-behavior gap on political climate action using the six most recent waves of our Climate Change in the American Mindsurveys spanning 2021-2023 (n = 6,190 U.S. adults). We focus on four political actions: (1) signing a petition about global warming, either online or in person; (2) donating money to an organization working on global warming; (3) volunteering time to an organization working on global warming; and (4) writing letters, emailing, or phoning government officials about global warming. Respondents were asked about their willingness to engage in each of the behaviors and, separately, how many times they had done them over the prior 12 months. We compare the gap between willingness to engage versus self-reported behavior across all four actions, and explore differences between Americans who are willing and active and those who are willing but inactive.
RESULTS......Many Americans say they “definitely” or “probably” would engage in political climate action if someone they like and respect asked them to. These actions include signing a petition about global warming, either online or in person (51%), donating money to an organization working on global warming (31%), volunteering time to an organization working on global warming (29%), or contacting government officials about global warming (28%). However, fewer Americans report engaging in these behaviors at least “once” in the prior 12 months (signing a petition, 16%; donating money, 13%; volunteering, 6%; contacting government officials, 8%). We find that Americans who are the most willing to engage in each climate action are also the most likely to actually do so. For instance, among the people who say they “definitely” would donate money to an organization working on global warming, 56% report donating money at least “once” in the past 12 months, while 40% report “never” doing so. By contrast, among those who say they “probably” would donate money, only 23% report donating money at least “once” over the past 12 months, while most (71%) report “never” doing so. However, there are gaps even among the people who are most willing to act. For each of the other three actions, half or more Americans who say they “definitely” or “probably” would do the specific behavior in question say they have “never” done it over the past 12 months. To understand the factors that may contribute to the attitude-behavior gap on climate action, we focused on the 30% of Americans who say they “definitely would” engage in at least one of the four behaviors. Half of this group (i.e., 15% of Americans) report doing at least one of the behaviors “once” or more often in the past 12 months (“Definitely willing and active”), while the other half have not (“Definitely willing but inactive”). We compared these groups to all other Americans and explored differences in communication behaviors, perceptions of social norms, and collective efficacy beliefs.....and there's much more https://