Most people think climate change primarily affects other people, a new analysis of previously published studies has found.
The findings demonstrate a well-known cognitive bias known as “overoptimism,” and specifically a type of cognitive bias called “overplacement,” which refers to the tendency for people to rate their own risks as less likely and less severe than the risks of others.
This trend makes people less likely to take actions to reduce their risk, such as quitting smoking or getting vaccinated. Overly optimistic risk perceptions may also make people less likely to support climate action, the researchers say.
“Many people may ask themselves: How likely is it that I will be affected by extreme weather events compared to other people?” says study team member Magnus Bergquist, a psychologist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. “What we found is that the majority of people around the world expect others to be more likely to suffer such consequences than themselves.”
Bergquist and his colleagues conducted a meta-analysis of 83 studies that surveyed more than 70,000 people in 17 countries about their perceptions of climate-related risks to themselves and others.
This analysis revealed that people generally perceive climate change to be more likely to affect others than themselves. This pattern holds true whether people are asked about the risks from extreme weather events or climate change in general.
In 81 of the 83 studies, participants rated their vulnerability as lower than others or lower than average. Statistical analysis shows that in 68% of cases, people believe that their own climate change-related risks are lower than others.
“We were surprised by the consistency and strength of the effect,” Bergquist says.
Optimism bias was most pronounced in studies conducted in the lowest-risk regions (Europe) and least pronounced in the highest-risk regions (Asia). And in the two studies that found no effects, the participants were farmers in China and South Korea who experienced the effects of climate change firsthand.
The underlying research did not collect information about participants’ individual climate-related risks, so there is no way to know whether people are assessing their own relative risks. That is a topic for future research.
Rather, the point of the current analysis is that, at the group level, the majority of people believe that their climate risks are below average. That means documenting the psychological phenomena that can make climate action more difficult.
Still, the framing of these questions is important. People are more likely to say that their climate risks are lower than others when the context is a broader comparison with their own countrymen or with humanity as a whole. The tendency to be overly optimistic is less pronounced when people compare their own risk to the risk of specific others, such as their neighbors or people on the street.
This finding suggests strategies for communicating about climate change. It is about reducing the tendency to be overly optimistic, for example by relating climate risks to specific groups rather than to humanity as a whole. Bergquist says this also needs to be tested in future research.
Source: Sandlund I. Others. “Meta-analytic evidence of self-other discrepancy in climate change-related risk perception.” natural sustainability 2026.
Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine.
