Let’s do something for our planet, or we will do something else: On the affective benefits of palliative ingroup identification in the face of climate change threat

Making people aware of climate change can elicit anxiety, promote individual and collective mitigation behavior, but also undesired palliative responses, such as ethnocentrism. In line with a general process model of threat and defense, we assumed a motivational process from anxiety to approach to underlie direct mitigation behavior as well as palliative ingroup identification in response to climate threat. In two online experiments (Ntotal = 553), we reminded participants of the negative consequences of climate change (compared to geographical facts), before we gave them the opportunity to engage in direct mitigation behavior (i.e., pro-environmental intentions) and palliation (i.e., ingroup identification). To test the entire affective-motivational process from threat-induced anxiety to defense-induced approach, we measured anxiety and approach proximally (i.e., after climate change threat) and distally (i.e., after defensive engagement). As expected, we found climate change threat to increase individual pro-environmental intentions and identification with self-selected ingroups directly (S1, N = 367), and indirectly through heightened feelings of anxiety (S1 and S2, N = 186). Further, we observed defensive engagement to restore feelings of positive activation and thus approach motivation. As structural equation modelling revealed, this was primarily due to increased ingroup identification (S1 and S2). As Study 2 focused in particular on identification with ideological groups (which was not explicitly specified in Study 1), this corroborated the notion that palliative responses to climate threat have a motivational and affective benefit for the self. We discuss different affective-motivational determinants and consequences for individual and collective (non)pro-environmental responses to climate threat.