TY - JOUR A1 - Oswald, Lisa A1 - Ernst, Andreas T1 - Flying in the Face of Climate Change: Quantitative psychological approach examining the social drivers of individual air travel JF - Journal of Sustainable Tourism N2 - Aviation contributes substantially to anthropogenic climate change. This paper situates individual behaviour changes alongside technological efficiency gains and policy processes in the search for significant emission reduction in the aviation sector. Using online survey methodology (N = 393) and expanding upon existing psychological perspectives on individual attitudes and behaviours, this study focuses on the social influence on air travel. Considering social identity and global social networks, two new instruments, the Cosmopolitan Identity Scale (CIS) and the Global Social Interconnectedness Score (GSIS), were introduced to capture the social drivers of air travel within standardized questionnaires. Different subgroups of travellers were clustered and compared along external and psychological variables, to allow the construction of more effective policies in the aviation sector. Overall, the awareness of environmental problems caused by flying led to a perceived dilemma between environmental attitudes and travel, which resulted in the engagement with carbon offsets. The global social interconnectedness, built through international experience, led to increased travel to visit friends and family, and an overall increase in flight kilometres. The social identification as a cosmopolitan was related to social media use and predicted flight kilometres directly, implying a particular sensitivity to social norm messages in online campaigns. KW - travel KW - flying KW - environmental attitude KW - social identity KW - social interconnectedness Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/09669582.2020.1812616 SN - 0966-9582 VL - 29 IS - 1 SP - 68 EP - 86 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Klaus, Geraldine A1 - Ernst, Andreas A1 - Oswald, Lisa T1 - Psychological factors influencing laypersons’ acceptance of climate engineering, climate change mitigation and business as usual scenarios JF - Technology in Society N2 - In the past two decades, research on so-called climate engineering approaches has increased. These technologies are considered to be potential substitutes for mitigation strategies in combating climate change. The ongoing process of layperson acceptance and resultant opinion formation can be expected to play a crucial role in future public debate about field experiments or the actual deployment of climate engineering. In July 2017, we assessed public reactions from the German population in a representative online survey. Participants were given a brief text informing them about climate change and one of four different scenarios in a between-subject design (N = 678). Two of the scenarios described the use of climate engineering technologies - stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) and bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) - one of them covered conventional mitigation strategies and the fourth group was given an outline of the business-as-usual (BAU) approach. The mitigation scenario (willingness for individual behaviour changes) showed the highest acceptance rate (M = 74.23), which was significantly higher than acceptance of the other scenarios (p < .001). Acceptance of BECCS (M = 53.15) was higher than acceptance of SAI (M = 46.25, p = .043) and BAU (M = 42.94; p = .006). We undertook a relative-importance analysis to investigate the influence of multiple predictor variables on acceptance formation for each scenario; the variance thus explained ranged from 80.3% to 86.8%. The results point up the influence of perceived risks, subjective norms and affective responses on the acceptance of climate engineering technologies. By contrast, person-specific and relatively stable variables, such as environmental attitudes and wishful thinking, are particularly relevant in the evaluation of the mitigation scenario. KW - Technology acceptance KW - Climate engineering KW - Geoengineering KW - Mitigation KW - Relative-importance method Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techsoc.2019.101222 SN - 0160-791X VL - 60 ER -