Expected climate change consequences and their role in explaining individual risk judgments

and activities’ were mentioned more often in these countries because they can be considered less vulnerable to direct climate change impacts [27]. It should be noted that all four countries included in the current study are western Euro- pean industrialized countries and that our findings might have limited generalizability outside of this context. Past and anticipated consequences of climate change may be different in other parts of the world, and people might have different associations. In line with this, both the dis- tribution of answers between the six categories and the content of the specific impacts could be different. For example, one study among people from the Western Cape in South Africa found that most interviewees mentioned the area’s ongoing water scarcity and rising food prices as effects of climate change [37], while another study found that air quality was fre- quently associated with climate change concern among residents in China [3]. Further, since previous research has shown that climate change impacts and impact associations can differ between regions within a country [38], future research could either zoom out to different parts of the world and/or zoom in to different regions within a country. Predicting impact beliefs In addition to differences between countries, we wanted to investigate whether age, gender, and political orientation were related to the consequences people mentioned in the open responses. The results show that, for most of the levels, the socio-demographics were not

important predictors. This was apparent both from the (lack of) significance of the coefficients and/or the model fit. One notable exception was category six; men, those belonging to older age groups, and those who place themselves further right on the political spectrum were more likely to answer that climate change will have ‘hardly any’ impacts on their respective coun- tries. This is in line with previous research looking at climate skepticism [e.g., 29, 39]. While mental imagery of future impacts of climate change can be shaped by personal experience with local events such as flooding and changing weather [24], not everyone attributes these events to climate change [32, 40]. One reason for thinking that climate change will have few or no impacts, independently of whether one’s country has been subject to extreme weather events, could be that the mentioned groups are more likely to question the causes and consequences of climate change and less likely to attribute specific weather events to climate change. Such an interpretation is in line with literature highlighting the social and motivated aspects of climate change beliefs [41, 42]. This could mean that increased climate and extreme weather events in the future will have limited influence on climate change acceptance and engagement among these groups unless they change their causal attributions. Predicting risk judgments Differentiating between affective (here: worry) and cognitive (here: risk evaluation) aspects of individual risk judgments are in line with the risk-as-feelings hypothesis that emphasizes that

the two can diverge when people are facing uncertain and risky situations [43–45]. Further, while the question about worry referred to judgments of climate change in general, the ques- tion about risk evaluation asks specifically about how negative climate change impacts will be on one’s country. While more than 50% of respondents in all four countries answered that the effects of climate change on their country will be ‘more negative than positive’ or ‘entirely neg- ative’, this was far more frequent in France and Germany than in Norway and the UK. Although the two outcomes were positively correlated in general, respondents in Germany reported being less worried about climate change as compared to respondents in France. One reason might be that the question did not specify when climate change will have (positive or negative) effects. In line with the concept of psychological distance [5], people’s social, PLOS ONE Expected climate change consequences and individual risk judgments PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0281258 February 15, 2023 10 / 15