Building consensus for ambitious climate action through the World Climate Simulation

Sociopolitical values are an important driver of climate change beliefs, attitudes, and policy preferences. People with 'individualist-hierarchical' values favor individual freedom, competition, and clearly defined social hierarchies, while communitarian-egalitarians value interdependence and equality across gender, age, heritage, and ethnicity. In the US, individualist-hierarchs generally perceive less risk from climate change and express lower support for actions to mitigate it than communitarian-egalitarians. Exposure to scientific information does little to change these views. Here, we ask if a widely-used experiential simulation, World Climate, can help overcome these barriers. World Climate combines an engaging role-play with an interactive computer model of the climate system. We examine pre- and post-World Climate survey responses from 2,080 participants in the US and use a general linear mixed model approach to analyze interactions among participants' sociopolitical values and ...