Climate change belief systems across political groups in the United States

Worry about global warming (hereafter “worry”) is the most central element of the belief system. The highest betweenness centrality score for worry indicates that it plays a significant role in connecting disparate elements such as beliefs, attitudes, policy support, and behaviors (μ = 59.23, 95% CI [45.42, 82.58]). Moreover, worry also has the highest closeness centrality score, indicating that changes in worry can influence other psychological elements or that changes in other elements can in turn influence worry (μ = .005, 95% CI [.005,.006]). Worry has the second highest strength centrality score, indicating that it has the potential to substantially impact its neighboring elements (μ = 1.21, 95% CI [1.18, 1.24]). Although US risk was estimated to have the highest strength centrality score (μ = 1.25, 95% CI [1.23, 1.28]), a substantial variance in this score (73%) was driven largely by its strong relationships with community risk perception (edge strength between US risk and community risk = .69, 95% CI [.68,.70]) and risk time (edge strength between US risk and risk time = .22, 95% CI [.20,.23]), indicating that changes in the US risk perception will likely influence only these neighboring elements or vice versa. Moreover, the lower scores for US risk in both betweenness (μ = 9.18, 95% CI [-2.48, 14.48]) and closeness centrality (μ = .004, 95% CI [.003,.004]) compared to those for worry further lends further evidence to our conclusion that worry is the most central element in the climate change belief system.

The pairwise comparison between worry and other elements indicates that the centrality scores of worry, including betweenness, closeness, and strength, are significantly higher than those of other elements, except for the strength centrality of US risk. The detailed results of the comparison are available in S1–S3 Tables in the supplemental material. Next, we examined the density of belief systems across political groups over the past decade. Fig 3 illustrates the results. In the analysis, we used Republicans as a reference, meaning that Fig 2. Betweenness, closeness, and strength centralities for each element. Note. Variables are ordered by betweenness centrality score. Centrality scores were estimated from the belief system from all participants. Each point on the graph represents the mean centrality score for a specific belief element, and error bars represent the 95% confidence interval for each estimate. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0300048.g002 PLOS ONE Climate change belief system PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0300048 March 20, 2024 9 / 16