THE ROLE OF CAUSAL KNOWLEDGE IN BEHAVIOURAL RESPONSES TO CLIMATE CHANGE: COMPARISON BETWEEN TWO TEACHING EXPERIMENTS

Lack of knowledge has often been considered as a minor factor in influencing behaviour towards the environment. However, surveys that went more in-depth in the investigation of people's knowledge about climate change revealed a relatively poor understanding of some basic climate dynamics. From the analysis of these surveys, we advanced the hypothesis that people are aware of climate change, but they lack knowledge of causal relations within climate dynamics, and, specifically, of what causes climate change. In a previous study, we ran a teaching experiment with secondary school students in order to investigate the relationship between knowledge and willingness to adopt pro-environmental behaviour. In this study we found that in order to trigger willingness to take pro-environmental actions, what is needed is not knowledge per se but with a causally focused kind of knowledge, that makes the role of individuals explicit. Starting form this result, we tested our hypothesis about causal knowledge with a control group in which we carried out a teaching course on climate change without the focus on causality and without stressing the individual dimension of the problems. The aim of this paper is to present the analysis of this data and to compare it with the results of the previous study.