Negations in uncertainty lexicon affect attention, decision-making and trust
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Negations in uncertainty lexicon affect attention, decision-making and trust Marie Juanchich 1 & Theodore G. Shepherd 2 & Miroslav Sirota 1 Received: 28 February 2019 / Accepted: 19 March 2020/ # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) currently communicates uncertainty using a lexicon that features four negative verbal probabilities to convey extremely low to medium probabilities (e.g. unlikely). We compare a positive probability lexicon with the IPCC lexicon in a series of psychology experiments. We find that although the positive and negative lexicons convey a similar level of probability, the positive lexicon directs more attention towards the outcome occurrence and encourages more cautious decisions: in our role-playing experiment, it reduced the number of type 2 errors, i.e. failures to make needed precautionary interventions. Whilst participants considered the negative lexicon more useful in making a decision, they trusted the positive lexicon more and blamed information providers less after making an incorrect decision. Our results suggest that the negative verbal framing of probabilities used by the IPCC is not neutral and has implications for how climate information is interpreted by decision-makers. Keywords Psychology . IPCC . Uncertainty . Communication . Decision-making
1 Introduction Despite people now mostly believing that climate change is occurring (Juanchich and Sirota 2017), climate change is not a primary concern of policy-makers and citizens (Hornsey et al. Open Science Statement: All the materials and data for all experiments and the pre-registration protocols for Exp. 2 and 3 are available at: https://osf.io/5efxt/?view_only=91a1d43bce044ad4b221513cabe78451.
* Marie Juanchich [email protected] * Theodore G. Shepherd [email protected]
1
Department of Psychology, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4 3SQ, UK
2
Department of Meteorology, University of Reading, Whiteknights, Reading RG6 6BB, UK
Climatic Change
2016). People’s beliefs do not necessarily translate into support for climate change mitigation policies or changes in behaviour that would reduce CO2 emissions (Hornsey et al. 2016; Leiserowitz 2006; Maibach et al. 2015). A recognised strategy for how to increase climate change engagement is to better inform policy makers and the public (van der Linden et al. 2015). Because climate change is inherently uncertain (Capstick and Pidgeon 2014), it is important to learn how to best communicate probabilities of climate change events (Budescu et al. 2012; Budescu et al. 2014; Patt and Dessai 2005; Smithson et al. 2012; Sterman 2011). The current IPCC uncertainty communication guidelines feature a list of seven verbal probabilities (left column of Table 1), which are used to quantify the likelihood of occurrence of climate change outcomes. Past work has focused on the shortcomings of communicating technical probabilistic information through those verbal probabilities. First, the numerical meaning of verbal probab
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