Oregon study says numbers make people care more about climate change

(The Center Square) – Climate scientists may be overlooking an effective way to educate the public about climate change, according to study from the University of Oregon funded by the National Science Foundation.

University of Oregon, Michigan State University, and Ohio State University researchers found that people are more likely to trust and share social media posts that contain numbers more than those without, the study found.

The researchers looked at tweets and Reddit posts about climate change.

Ellen Peters, director of the UO’s Center for Science Communication Research, said it's one of the most pressing issues that requires using numeric information.

“The majority of the American public at this point do believe that climate change is real and happening, but what's missing is people engaging with it and understanding what actions can be done,” Peters said. “Social media is one of the places where the public and scientists can come together and potentially learn from each other.”

Peters and her team looked at tweets from about 1,500 climate scientists and found that just 23% of these posts contained numbers. However, people were more likely to share the numerical tweets than the non-numerical ones.

David Markowitz, a former assistant professor of social media data analytics at the UO’s School of Journalism and Communication, argues that climate communicators may underestimate how important numerical information can be when it comes to improving the public's knowledge of ongoing environmental issues.

“Numbers can be scary and daunting, but people don't shy away from them,” Markowitz, now an associate professor at Michigan State University, said in the release. “Our results show that people engage with numbers, and that's quite encouraging for journalists or scientists in the climate change arena who want to know the best ways to engage the public.”

PNAS Nexus published the researchers' taxpayer-funded findings on July 23, 2024.

Past studies indicated that people trust messages containing numbers more from physicians and journalists, the report said. For example, Peters said people were more likely to support vaccines if they saw the statistical likelihood of side effects. She wondered if statistics could have the same impact on people's views of climate change.

Peters and her team looked at data from X (formerly known as Twitter) and Reddit. They studied over eight million tweets, plus 17,000 posts and comments related to climate change.

The researchers found that messages with numerical information had greater engagement than those without. These posts got 16.9% more retweets on X and 31.7% more upvotes on Reddit.