Climate, Morals, and Politics

It is well established that conservative political attitudes are predictive of scepticism towards the reality and anthropomorphic origin of climate change. First, conservatism is not a homogenous psychological variable and differs between national cultures. Second, according to the Moral Foundations Theory, there are basic modules analysing social triggers automatically and intuitively. These modules, accord-ingly, shape political attitudes and the processing of facts. The first objective of the present study is to investigate how political (conservative vs. populist) attitudes in Germany mediate the relationship between moral values and scepticism towards climate change. Further, conservative attitudes could semantically lead to attitudes and intentions aimed at conserving humans’ natural environment. The second objective is to use cluster analysis to potentially identify sub-groups of conservative persons which are low in scepticism. The third objective is to differentiate atti-tudes towards global climate change from attitudes towards the perseveration of regional/national na-ture. A convenience sample of German participants was recruited. The questionnaire was sent via an anonymous, non-personal link on various platforms. Participants are asked to complete an online survey using the moral foundations questionnaire (Gra-ham et al., 2011) including the liberty scale (Iyer et al., 2012), the Populism Scale (Akkerman et al., 2014), the contemporary German questionnaire of political orientation (CGOPOQ; Demel et al., 2023), and the climate change perception scale (CCPS; van Valkengoed et al., 2021). Attitudes towards pre-serving regional/national nature are measured using a convenience instrument. unknown other