Date: 2026-06-19 Venue: International Conference on Environment and Society Location: Konstanz, Germany
Although the last decades have witnessed increasing climate change awareness, shifts in individuals’ consumption patterns are still limited in scope and depth. However, the mechanisms explaining this attitude-behaviour gap remain not fully understood. Indeed, individuals may differ in their shared beliefs about what kind of solutions are necessary and which sacrifices they are ready to make.
Using data from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) Environment IV (2020), this study explores the shared belief systems underlying individuals’ attitudes towards individuals’ solutions and capacity to act on climate change. Using Correlational Class Analysis (Boutyline, 2017), a method that aims to find shared cultural schemas in a population and represent them as a network of survey items, I identify the subjacent structure of climate-related beliefs across individuals and examine how these belief systems relate to environmental concern and pro-environmental behaviours.
The analysis reveals four distinct belief systems emerging from the data, which represent meaningful configurations of attitudes that transcend simple agreement or disagreement with isolated climate actions.
Multilevel analysis further demonstrates that this belief system categorization is robust and stable across European countries, suggesting that these patterns reflect fundamental orientations rather than context-specific responses. Importantly, belief system membership serves as a significant predictor of both environmental concern and actual pro-environmental behaviours, outperforming several traditional attitudinal measures in explaining the attitude-behaviour gap.
These findings contribute to understanding the heterogeneity in climate change engagement and have important implications for targeted climate communication and policy interventions.