Leading by example from high-status individuals: exploring a crucial missing link in climate change mitigation

Westlake, Steve, Demski, Christina and Pidgeon, Nick ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8991-0398 2024. Leading by example from high-status individuals: exploring a crucial missing link in climate change mitigation. Humanities & Social Sciences Communications 11 , 1292. 10.1057/s41599-024-03787-8

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Abstract

Behaviour change has great potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions quickly, helping to prevent dangerous global warming. Some of the most impactful changes are: flying less, eating less meat, driving electric cars, improving home energy efficiency, increased use of public transport and active travel. However, these choices have proved elusive at scale and are rarely encouraged or modelled by high-status individuals (“leaders”), despite established knowledge about the influence of leaders as role models. Applying theories of embodied leadership and credibility enhancing displays, our novel pre-registered survey experiment (n = 1267) reveals that visible leading by example from politicians and celebrities significantly increases the willingness of members of the UK public to make these high-impact low-carbon choices. In addition, leading by example greatly increases perceptions of leader credibility, trustworthiness, competence, and favourability. We find no significant effects of leading by example on people’s wider perceptions of climate change, but a strong “appetite for leadership” among the public is revealed. In light of these findings, we discuss how embodied leadership by way of visible low-carbon behaviour from leaders may provide a crucial “missing link” for climate change mitigation.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	Published
Schools:	Psychology
Publisher:	Springer Nature [academic journals on nature.com]
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	18 September 2024
Date of Acceptance:	13 September 2024
Last Modified:	17 Oct 2024 14:16
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/172242

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