Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Defense Against Defensiveness: How Important Personal Values Can Promote More Adaptive Responses To Severe Environmental Threat, Kathryn Schuett

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

People respond defensively to threatening risk information about the future. For example, people may respond with denial to threatening information about environmental consequences, resulting in inaction which ironically increases the risk. The current thesis was designed to examine individuals’ responses to future climate change risk when under different types and levels of threat. We predicted defensive response under threat, but also sought to investigate a factor that might mitigate defensiveness: reflecting on personally important values. In Study 1 we sought to examine individuals’ responses to a climate risk message after they were induced to feel low or high personal control …