Climate change belief systems across political groups in the United States

overlapping structure with the Independents (M = .50, SD = 13), followed by the Republicans (M = .47, SD = 13) and the Democrats (M = .44, SD = 13). Comparing the belief systems of the three groups indicated that the average GDD score for the pair of Republicans and Democrats (M = .34, SD = .05) was significantly lower than that of the pair of Democrats and Indepen- dents (M = .37, SD = .04), diff = .03, p < .01. In other words, Democrats had a more structur- ally similar belief system to Republicans than to Independents. There was no significant difference between the pair of Republicans and Democrats (M = .34, SD = .05) and the pair of Republicans and Independents (M = .35, SD = .04), diff = .01, p = .96. In other words, the level of heterogeneity was similar between the pair of Republicans and Democrats and the pair of the Republicans and Independents. These results are illustrated in Fig 5. We performed an out- lier sensitivity test to ensure the findings were robust without outliers. The results showed that the findings were nearly identical before and after removing outliers. The details of the sensi- tivity test can be found in the supplementary material. Discussion This study indicates that worry about global warming is the most central element of climate change belief systems in the United States. Although other studies have also identified worry as a significant factor [1, 23], our investigation reaffirms its importance from a structural standpoint, finding that worry plays multiple important roles in people’s climate change belief

systems. Worry plays a significant role in connecting various psychological elements, includ- ing beliefs, risk perceptions, attitudes, policy support, and behaviors. Moreover, changes in the level of worry have a greater potential than other elements to have cascading impacts on other psychological and behavioral elements within the system. Fig 4. Intra-group comparison of belief systems for each political group. Note. Each dot represents the graph diffusion distance (GDD) score of two belief systems. More specifically, each dot represents a comparison between different waves of data collected at different time points, within each political group. GDD scores are normalized to fall within 0 to 1. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0300048.g004 PLOS ONE Climate change belief system PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0300048 March 20, 2024 11 / 16