The various forms of anger about climate change in Australia and their relations with self-reported actions, intentions, and distress

Abstract

Action on societal issues is often precipitated by feelings of anger. This has been demonstrated reliably for responses to social inequality, but less for other issues. We build on nascent research documenting the links between climate anger, pro-environmental action, and psychological distress, by focusing on the contents of eco-anger. Using a sample of 5244 Australians, we found that 48.6% reported being at least ‘somewhat’ angry about climate change. Content analyses of the focus of this anger revealed diverse reasons for people's anger. The most common focus was others' inaction and apathy on climate change, followed by anger directed at deniers, and at big polluters. Altogether, we identified 13 major categories of anger in our corpus of data. In further exploratory analyses, we examined the correlations between anger forms, self-reported pro-environmental behaviour, collective action intentions, and distress. Our findings suggest that behavioural engagement with climate change could depend, in part, on why people are angry. Show more