Chasing Our Tails: Psychological, Institutional and Societal Paradoxes in Natural Resource Management, Sustainability, and Climate Change in Australia

Natural Resource Management (NRM) and Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESD) have been guiding frameworks in Australia for a number of decades. Recently, NRM and ESD have become central to climate change mitigation. In this paper, we explore the psychological paradoxes that function within climate change settings, with particular attention devoted to the way that research and development reinforces these paradoxes by advocating for participatory forms of inquiry. Paradox emerges in NRM at psychological, institutional, and organisational levels. Paradoxes are also features of different forms of democracy such as neoliberal and participatory democracy. Although NRM, ESD and climate change are often conceptualised as distinct issue domains, these policy areas are fundamentally interconnected in both theory and in practice. This interconnection between these policy and research settings, reflections on paradox, and the experience of incorporating community psychology into the paradoxical settings of NRM and climate change are captured in this paper.     

Anxiety,Sophistication, and Resistance to Persuasion: Evidence from a Quasi‐Experimental Survey on Global Climate Change

Our contribution deals with the emotional and cognitive foundations of resistance to persuasive information. We rely on an original quasi‐experimental protocol that simulates the flow of information and the respondents' reactions to persuasive arguments on global climate change. Respondents in a representative sample (N = 604) were asked if they supported reduction of economic activity to reduce climate warming and were then provided, based on their support or disapproval for this first argument, with counterattitudinal arguments to test their resistance to persuasion. This article highlights that sophistication strengthens resistance to persuasion, whereas anxiety has a double effect: directly, it decreases resistance; indirectly, it interacts with political sophistication and makes sophisticates less likely to resist persuasion when facing arguments inconsistent with their previous beliefs. Nonanxious citizens, in turn, are more likely to resist persuasion when their political sophistication increases. We also provide evidence that the joint effect of anxiety and sophistication is moderated by the ideological identification of respondents.