Reducing, and Bridging, the Psychological Distance of Climate Change

What the evidence shows

This study tests two communication strategies climate advocates commonly use: “proximising” (framing climate impacts as local/nearby) and “bridging” (invoking a shared global identity so distant impacts feel relevant, too). The authors set out to test an assumption baked into a lot of advocacy practice — that making climate change feel closer to home automatically makes it feel more relevant and drives more engagement — because prior research had only tested pieces of that causal chain, with mixed results.

Participants read a news article about climate impacts framed as affecting either the UK (proximal) or Bangladesh (distant), after first watching either a video designed to raise a sense of global human connectedness or a neutral control video. After that, the study traced a full path model: does the framing change perceived psychological distance? Does that change perceived relevance? Does that translate into actual protective behaviour (information-seeking, budget allocation to climate initiatives, behavioural intentions)?

The core contribution is disentangling whether proximising works from how it might work, and testing an alternative: that cultivating identification with all of humanity could let advocates communicate genuinely distant impacts (e.g., in the Global South) without needing to falsely localise them.

Key Findings

• Proximal framing (UK-focused news text) significantly reduced participants’ psychological socio-spatial distance of climate change compared to distant framing (Bangladesh-focused), a moderate effect (β = -.30).

• Proximising had no significant direct or total effect on perceived relevance or on downstream behaviour — the effect only showed up as a small, statistically significant indirect path running through reduced psychological distance and increased relevance (indirect β ≈ .02–.06 across outcomes).

• Raising the salience of global identity (via the connectedness video) did not, on its own, increase relevance or behavioural engagement — the study’s more straightforward “does this video help” hypotheses were not supported.

• Global identity salience did moderate the relationship between psychological distance and relevance: among people who saw the control video, greater perceived distance was associated with lower relevance (β = -.29); among people who saw the global-identity video, that relationship disappeared (β = -.09) — evidence for a genuine “bridging” effect rather than a main effect.

• A follow-up explicit measure of “situational global identity” found no effect of the video condition, suggesting the manipulation’s effect operated below conscious self-report — a caution for anyone assuming a felt sense of connectedness is the mechanism.

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Stand-out data points

• β = -.30 (p < .001): proximal (UK) vs. distant (Bangladesh) framing reduced participants’ psychological socio-spatial distance of climate change.

• β = -.29 vs. β = -.09: the “distance kills relevance” relationship held for the control-video group but effectively vanished for the global-identity-video group — the paper’s key bridging finding.

• N = 508 (UK quota sample), 4-condition experimental core n = 400: a reasonably well-powered single-country experiment, though the authors themselves flag it as underpowered for the interaction test they ultimately rely on for their headline finding.

Examples of how Understories uses this research

• Clarity Supports flagging when a message relies on vague “climate change is happening everywhere” language without either concrete local stakes or an explicit global-connectedness frame.

• Emotional resonance The global-identity “bridging” finding supports scoring messages higher when they invoke shared humanity/connectedness alongside distant impacts, rather than relying on abstract statistics alone.

• Personal relevance Directly supports scoring recommendations about how to raise perceived relevance of distant impacts via either localisation or connectedness framing.

• Beneficence Supports advocates who need to discuss impacts on distant communities (e.g., Global South flooding) without artificially “relocating” the story to feel closer to a Global North audience — bridging via shared humanity is an evidence-backed alternative to misleading localisation.

non-exhaustive

Key quote

On the core takeaway: the authors conclude it is “useful to report local consequences of climate change, or to communicate global connectedness if global consequences of climate change are described” — framing the two strategies as complementary, not competing.

© 2020 Loy & Spence.

Library entry updated: 7 October 2026