Whose house is on fire; when will we fail? Psychological distance of climate change inconsistently responds to social and temporal proximization

There is broad scientific consensus that anthropogenic climate change is leading to large-scale, irreparable losses and damages if we continue not to take comprehensive action to reduce the carbon emissions that lead to a global temperature rise. Climate change is also a complex issue that requires multiple experts to be involved in action toward its mitigation. Therefore, adequately communicating the associated risks and needs for action to a broad audience is vital, but challenging. In the last few decades, message frames have been used to increase audiences’ subjective relevance of climate change, thus raising public awareness for climate change and climate action. A challenge that has often been articulated is that climate change is perceived as a distant and abstract issue (e.g., Spence et al., 2012) which makes it difficult for individuals to grasp its effects or the effectiveness of climate action. The present experiments aim to investigate how the perceived (psychological) distance of climate change can be reduced at the individual level, and to identify paths from proximizing climate change to increasing climate action.