A critical step in tackling climate change involves structural, system-level changes facilitating action. Despite their ubiquity, little is known about how internet search algorithms portray climate change, and how these portrayals impact concern and action. In a sample of 49 countries, we found that nationwide climate concern, but not nation-level climate impact, predicted the emotional arousal caused by climate change Google Image Search outputs, as rated by a naive sample (n = 383). In a follow-up experiment we randomly assigned another sample (n = 899) to receive the climate change image outputs resulting from searches conducted in countries high or low in pre-existing climate concern, and found that participants exposed to images from countries with high pre-existing concern (compared to low) became more concerned about climate change, supportive of climate policy and likely to act pro-environmentally, suggesting a cycle of climate sentiment propagation systemically facilitated by internet search algorithms. We discuss the implications of these findings for climate action interventions.
a, Subjective pre-existing climate change concern (operationalized as percentage of people concerned about climate change in each country; standardized) predicting the emotionality of climate change internet search outputs (from Google Image Search) in each nation (49 nations total; rated by a sample of 383 participants; all variables standardized). The line represents the best-fit regression; the error band represents 95% confidence interval around the mean. See Supplementary Table 3 for a list of country codes. b, The 49 nations included in study 1 analyses. Darker colours denote higher subjective climate concern. Source: 10.1038/s41558-024-02178-w
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
