In order to learn about attitudes towards climate-related foreign aid, and the specific impact of alternative motivational frames, we fielded a national online survey of 5065 American respondents on Prolific, a platform for online subject recruitment designed for researchers.3 Researchers have concluded that respondents on Prolific were “more likely to pass various attention checks, provide meaningful answers, follow instructions, remember previously presented information, have a unique IP address and geolocation, and work slowly enough to be able to read all the items” when compared to other online platforms as well as university undergraduates (Douglas et al, 2023).
Individuals recruited into the online panel were told they would participate in an approximately 10-minute survey, and would be asked about their views about a number of challenges facing the US government. After providing consent and confirmation that they were 18 and older, they began the questionnaire.
The study contained a number of attention checks, and we randomized the order of some questions in order to mitigate against priming effects. We asked a battery of demographic questions, including about race, income, gender, and partisan attachment.4
The experimental intervention consisted of three conditions. In the control condition, we introduced the idea that Americans might use taxpayer money for
climate-related foreign aid using the following text:
Some say that Americans should contribute to helping poor countries adapt to the changing climate.
In the two treatment conditions, we supplemented this text with additional information, designed to deliver one of two frames. In the climate justice frame, respondents were shown an image of cumulative CO2 emissions over-time, which highlights that the United States has emitted exponentially more than a few key middle-income countries and the low-income countries in total, along with text that refers to the United States as “the biggest polluter in history.” In the solidarity frame, respondents were also shown a figure depicting historic carbon emissions. However, in this figure, the data were aggregated for the entire world. Moreover, the text highlighted that, “we are all in this together. We must act in solidarity as we all face the current levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as shown in the figure.” The overall look and text length of these treatments were similar (see Fig. 1).
Following the presentation of the assigned motivational frame, we measured respondents’ support for climate-related foreign aid with two questions that we pre-registered to combine into a single index (responses to the questions are correlated at R = .68, p < .001).
First, respondents were asked, “Do you believe that the United States should contribute to helping poor countries adapt to the changing climate?” and offered a 5-point scale ranging from Strongly agree to Strongly disagree. (All responses were subsequently recoded on a 0–1 scale, where 0 and 1 represented the realized minimum and maximum pro-climate responses, and fractions were assigned in equal proportions based on the number of options.)
Second, respondents were asked a question that detailed specific possibilities for U.S. government aid with a vignette that reflected actual news / policy developments:
On April 20, 2023, the President pledged $1 billion per year to a global Climate Fund to help the poorer countries suffering most from climate change. The President had previously pledged $11.4 billion per year in climate aid to poorer countries.
Some highlight that this is much less than what was originally pledged; while others say that the U.S. should not be providing this aid at all. What do you think the U.S. government should provide?
For that question, respondents were offered 6 response options, anchored at the extremes of, “No aid,” and “More than $15bn.”5
In addition, as a supplementary question about private support, we asked respondents about their propensity to make personal climate-related donations:
Imagine that you received $100 today. You have the option to donate this money to a leading charity fighting climate change in poor countries. About how much would you personally donate to counter the effects of climate change in the developing world? [Response options from $0 to $100 in increments of $10.]
We also asked a series of questions about possible hypothesized mechanisms and conditioning variables (see details in the appendix).