The Effect of Climate Change Threat on Public Attitudes towards Ethnic and Religious Minorities and Climate Refugees

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This entry includes the text of five surveys distributed via Qualtrics company to ethnic white British citizens in 2020 (Study 1: Survey T1 and T2) and 2021 (Study 2 - different sample from Study 1) and 2023 (Study 3: Survey T1 and T2 - different sample from previous surveys) and associated datasets. Hence, Study 1 and Study 3 consist of two survey waves whereby the second wave was a recontact of participants in wave 1. All studies use a different sample of ethnic white British citizens. The surveys used an experimental design (Study 1 (T2) , Study 2, Study 3 (T2)) to investigate the effect of climate change threat on attitudes towards ethnic/religious minorities and climate refugees. We found no significant direct effect. We found that social majority members who are exposed to threatening information about climate change and, at the same time, feel little national efficacy over climate change, evaluate more negatively those minorities that are perceived as posing the biggest challenge to national cohesion and unity (Muslims+Pakistanis). Similar results for the evaluation of climate refugees were statistically significant only in one of the experiments (Study 1). The moderating role of collective climate efficacy beliefs suggests that processes of group-based control may be central for explaining authoritarian and ethnocentric responses to climate change threat. The data was cleaned of variables pertaining to a different study on the effect of climate change threat on environmental extremism, which is still under analysis. More information on this research can be found in these pre-registrations: https://aspredicted.org/S8X_13Z, https://aspredicted.org/ZXZ_SXQ and https://aspredicted.org/6ka4k.pdf.

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