# Who's Interested in Global Warming?

## TL;DR

This study explores how personality traits and political orientation influence attitudes toward global warming.

## Contribution

The paper introduces dispositional optimism as a novel predictor of attitudes toward global warming, showing it interacts with political orientation.

## Key findings

- Right-wing political orientation is inversely associated with concern about global warming.
- Optimism is positively linked to taking global warming seriously, especially among right-wing individuals.
- Education and personality traits like Competitiveness also significantly influence GW attitudes.

## Abstract

We report on a study of the correlates of attitude to global warming (GW). We build on prior research on the role of demographic variables, personality, and political orientation in predicting attitude to GW. We argue dispositional optimism should increase willingness to treat GW seriously, via its impact on active coping behaviors and reducing cognitive avoidance in the face of anxiety, and that there should be an interactive effect of optimism with political orientation. We draw on an existing data set (N = 819) of adult respondents. We use correlation and regression analysis to examine the association between demographic variables, personality traits, optimism, political orientation and GW attitude. We use moderated regression to test for an interactive effect between political orientation and optimism on GW attitude. We find a significant inverse association between (more right‐wing) political orientation and GW attitude, and a positive association between education and GW attitude. We find personality effects, the strongest of which is an inverse association between Competitiveness and GW attitude. As hypothesized, we find that optimism is positively associated with GW attitude and that this association is stronger for more right‐wing political orientation. We draw conclusions for the efficacy of approaches to communicating about climate change to different groups. We consider limitations of the research and implications for future research.