Threat and Anxiety in the Climate Debate:An Agent-Based Model to investigate Climate Scepticism and Pro-Environmental Behaviour

How people react to threatening information such as climate change is a complicated matter. While people with a high environmental self-identity tend to react approach-motivated by engaging in pro-environmental behaviour, people of low environmental self-identity may exhibit proximal defence behaviour, by avoiding and distracting themselves from potentially threatening stimuli caused by identified anxious thoughts and circumstances. This psychological theory has recently been tested in experimental studies in which the results suggest that the promotion of climate change information can also backfire. Based on these findings, we propose an agent-based model to address influences on anxiety and correlated pro-environmental actions in relation to societal attitudes of climate change scepticism and environmental self-identity.