An academic in Lancaster’s Psychology Department, in collaboration with The University of Oslo and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, has been investigating the impact of war-based metaphors in communications surrounding climate change, examining the differences in reaction between liberal and conservative individuals.

The study – conducted by Psychology PhD student Claudia Gaele, alongside Dr Lacey Okonski of The University of Oslo and Dr Adan Martinez-Cruz of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences - involved 145 participants undertaking a reading task, in which they were asked to read a short, fictional article reporting on recent climate findings, experts warnings, and the US government’s actions to address climate change. Participants were randomly assigned to either a control article, which referred to climate change as an “issue”, or an article which used war metaphors, referring to climate change as a “battle”, “fight”, or “war”.

In addition to this, participants were also given a questionnaire to determine where on the political spectrum they fell (from very liberal to very conservative), as well as being asked whether they identified politically as a Democrat or a Republican, a climate attitude questionnaire, an aggressiveness questionnaire and a fear questionnaire. The latter three were administered twice, both before and after the reading exercise, to identify any changes in attitude brought about by the exercise. The team wanted to investigate whether using war-based metaphorical framing to describe climate change had any impact upon an individual's anxiety or anger levels, and their attitude towards climate change as a whole.

The impact of metaphor usage had some surprising results on the participants; the team found that war-based metaphors induced greater levels of fear anxiety across both groups, but especially amongst Republicans, suggesting that Republicans - despite commonly being associated with climate change scepticism – are not necessarily apathetic towards climate change. That said, the study also found that it was the Democrat participants that were more likely to change their climate attitudes and be more willing to take action against climate change as a result of reading the article containing war metaphors compared to their Republican counterparts.

These novel results suggest a great deal of merit in pursuing similar studies in the future in order to examine the potential impact of metaphor usage in climate change rhetoric. On their ambitions for the future of this work, Claudia Gaele commented: “We’re particularly interested in investigating which affective responses underpin the realisation of war metaphors, and how individual personality traits may shape or mediate those responses. We would also like to explore whether war metaphors are an effective communication tool across the political spectrum, and why we observed social inertia in the conservative sample, despite them experiencing fear. We would also like to explore these topics through a combination of empirical research strategies, including online, field, and discrete choice experiments.”