The complaining but competent confronter: An experimental examination of the social costs and benefits related to interpersonal confrontations in climate change conversations

Abstract

Previous evidence has shown that individuals who openly disapprove of a conversation partner's environmentally undesirable behaviour are subject to negative evaluations from observers, commonly referred to as social costs. This study examined whether these findings can still be replicated several years later and whether social costs are influenced by the perceived morality of a topic.

We conducted three separate experimental studies with in total N = 715 participants. Participants read an online vignette in which provocative statements regarding climate change or injustice were either confronted or not. ANOVAs and moderation analyses were used to compare the participants’ ratings of the characters in the different confrontation conditions and the role of morality.

The results revealed that, regardless of the conversation topic, confronters were evaluated significantly more negatively than non-confronters on only one social cost outcome. For the first time, we also found evidence for the emergence of more beneficial evaluations of confronters in the environmental domain. Furthermore, our findings partially support the assumption that more social costs arise when a topic is perceived as less moral.

We conclude that our findings do not support previous conclusions stating that confronting climate change disregard is less acceptable than confronting racism. Instead, our results suggest that confronters of undesirable behaviour might in general even be perceived as more competent than non-confronters. An important next step for future studies is to examine real conversations and actual behavioural consequences.