Climate change risk perception in the USA and alignment with sustainable travel behaviours

technology to be able to mitigate the impact of climate change, could result in people underes- timating the likelihood of the consequences of climate change. Optimism bias occurs when an individual believes their future will be better than that of their peers even though statistically and realistically it probably won’t be [18]. By focusing on participants’ abilities to visualize the distant future and their future optimism, we aim to better understand what information may be used when making climate change risk judgements. Difficulty visualizing future consequences of climate change. When judging climate change risk, it is important to consider the potential consequences of climate change, but since these consequences are often reported in the timeframes of 2050 or 2100 [1], assessing climate change risk realistically requires the ability to imagine a world more than 25 years into the future. The problem is that people have difficulty visualizing that far ahead [19]. This may make it difficult for people to visualize the consequences of both mitigation and inaction. In fact, the further into the future people imagine, the longer it takes them to visualize [20] and the less clear the visualisation becomes [19, 20], a point no doubt influenced by the accelera- tion of technologies and the rapid pace of change in contemporary societies. This process can be further affected by age [21] and habitual emotional suppression [22]. The abstract nature of the future may inspire procrastination as people wait for more infor-

mation before making a decision [15]. This has important implications for climate change as the cumulative nature of carbon emissions means the longer it takes to reduce emissions, the more drastic the emissions reduction needs to be. While the near future is fairly concrete and contextualized the distant future is more abstract [15]. Because of this, people may have a diffi- cult time visualizing the consequences of how climate change will affect their lives in the dis- tant future. This may inhibit their ability to assess the risk of climate change, as well as their willingness to engage in mitigation. Sheppard et al. found that Canadians were more motivated to change their behaviours when they were presented with computer-generated pictures of how climate change might affect their local community which helped them to visualize these consequences [23]. Optimism bias. Another way in which the futuristic nature of climate change might influ- ence peoples’ perception of climate change risk involves optimism. People are more likely to imagine positive futures compared to negative futures [24]. Therefore, people may have trou- ble imagining climate change as a personally negative thing. When university students were asked to describe their futures, Newby-Clark and Ross found that participants discussed mostly positive experiences [24]. However, students discussed both positive and negative expe- riences when talking about the past. Researchers followed up this experiment by specifically asking students to imagine both positive and negative futures and found that it took

Fig 1. Theoretical framework that guided this research. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0244545.g001 PLOS ONE Climate change risk perception in the USA and alignment with sustainable travel behaviours PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0244545 February 3, 2021 3 / 17