In a recent article, Lieke Voorintholt (IAAEU and Trier University), Adriaan Soetevent, and Gerard van den Berg (both at the University of Groningen) examine whether a common survey question to elicit climate change worries is affected by a subtle difference in wording.
They set up a survey experiment in the British Understanding Society Innovation Panel. Control group respondents indicate the extent to which they agree with the statement: “The effects of climate change are too far in the future to worry me.” Respondents in the treatment group receive a version that replaces “worry me” with “worry about”, which may prompt them to put relatively less weight on personal costs of climate change as opposed to societal costs.
The authors find that reported climate change worries are on average significantly higher in the treatment group, suggesting that environmental attitude measures are sensitive to formulation details. The paper discusses the implications for the interpretation of previously collected data. Future research could adopt rigorous testing and validation procedures to establish a standardized measure of climate change worries to avoid under- or overestimation of such worries and related effect size estimates.
The open-access paper is available online: Voorintholt, L., Soetevent, A. R., & van den Berg, G. J. (2026). Measuring worries about climate change: The effect of a subtle wording change. Journal of Economic Psychology, 115, 102904.
They set up a survey experiment in the British Understanding Society Innovation Panel. Control group respondents indicate the extent to which they agree with the statement: “The effects of climate change are too far in the future to worry me.” Respondents in the treatment group receive a version that replaces “worry me” with “worry about”, which may prompt them to put relatively less weight on personal costs of climate change as opposed to societal costs.
The authors find that reported climate change worries are on average significantly higher in the treatment group, suggesting that environmental attitude measures are sensitive to formulation details. The paper discusses the implications for the interpretation of previously collected data. Future research could adopt rigorous testing and validation procedures to establish a standardized measure of climate change worries to avoid under- or overestimation of such worries and related effect size estimates.
The open-access paper is available online: Voorintholt, L., Soetevent, A. R., & van den Berg, G. J. (2026). Measuring worries about climate change: The effect of a subtle wording change. Journal of Economic Psychology, 115, 102904.
