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

expected, our respondents tended to be optimistic about their personal futures (Fig 3A). There was also large optimism surrounding the role of technology (Fig 3B). In fact, 76% of partici- pants either ‘agreed’ or ‘strongly agreed’ with the statement that advancing technology provides us with hope for the future (Fig 3B). Interestingly, participants who were more likely to agree that future technology provides hope for the future were also more concerned about climate change (Spearman’s r(1035) = 0.123, p < 0.001). Since there was a correlation between the statement future technology provides hope for the future and participants’ level of concern about climate change, we re-tested our hypothesis this time separating personal optimism and technological optimism (Model 2). We found that, while technological optimism was identified as a significant predictor of levels of climate change concern (Table 1), Model 2 still only explained < 1% of the variance. The results from Model 1 and Model 2 suggest that our original hypothesis that self-reported ability to visualize the distant future and future optimism would be good predictors of climate change risk per- ception is not valid. One explanation for the rejection of our hypothesis could be that our initial assumption that Americans were not concerned about climate change was incorrect. When this research Fig 2. Participants’ self-reported ability to visualize the year 2050. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0244545.g002

Fig 3. Percentage agreement on statements regarding participants’ personal optimism (a) and technological optimism (b). (N = 1068–1071) �original wording: I rarely count on good things happening to me. �� original wording: Future resource shortages will not be solved by technology. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0244545.g003 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 8 / 17