Systems thinking as a pathway to global warming beliefs and attitudes through an ecological worldview

Significance Systems thinking is recognized as vital to understanding climate science and addressing climate change. Understanding how systems thinking influences the public’s beliefs and attitudes about climate change has important implications for climate change education and communication. Our findings indicate that across the political spectrum, systems thinking may facilitate an ecological ethic or value system that humans should preserve and protect the natural world rather than exploit it. This, in turn, may strengthen proclimate views and understanding of climate change (e.g., that global warming is happening, is human-caused, etc.). The findings contribute to systems thinking theory and indicate the importance of promoting systems thinking to support proclimate science beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors across political lines. Prior research has found that systems thinking, the tendency to perceive phenomena as interconnected and dynamic, is associated with a general proenvironmental orientation. However, less is known about its relationship with public understanding of climate change and/or whether this relationship varies across people with different political views. Because climate change is a highly politicized issue, it is also important to understand the extent to which systems thinking can foster acceptance of climate science across political lines. Using an online sample of US adults (n = 1,058), we tested the degree to which systems thinking predicts global warming beliefs and attitudes (e.g., believing that global warming is happening, that it is human-caused, etc.), independent of an ecological worldview (i.e., the New Ecological Paradigm). We found that although systems thinking is positively related to global warming beliefs and attitudes, the relationships are almost fully explained by an ecological worldview. Indirect effects of systems thinking are consistently strong across political ideologies and party affiliations, although slightly stronger for conservatives and Republicans than for liberals and Democrats, respectively. We did not find evidence of the converse: Systems thinking does not seem to mediate the relationship between an ecological worldview and global warming beliefs and attitudes. Together, these findings suggest that systems thinking may support the adoption of global warming beliefs and attitudes indirectly by helping to develop an ecological ethic that people should take care of and not abuse the environment.