Sadi Shanaah (Research Fellow at PAIS), together with Immo Fritsche (Leipzig University) and Mathias Osmundsen (Aarhus University), has published an article on the psychological impact of climate change threat on intergroup relationsLink opens in a new window in the prestigious journal Group Processes & Intergroup Relations.

The article shows, for the first time, that climate change can have negative impact on social majority's attitudes towards certain ethnic and religious minorities even in rich Western countries. Specifically, using three survey experiments with self-identified White British participants (N = 616, N = 587, and N = 535), the paper demonstrates that social majority members who are exposed to threatening information about climate change (vs. neutral information) and, at the same time, feel little national efficacy over climate change, evaluate more negatively certain ethnic and religious minorities, especially Muslims and Pakistanis. The same trend is found in the evaluation of climate refugees, although it reached statistical significance only in one of the experiments.

These reactions are explained as pertaining to groups that are perceived as threatening the salient ingroup and its collective agency. This research significantly contributes to the literature on the social and political implications of (climate change) threat, especially by focusing on boundary conditions, namely the perception of collective control in case of complex and large threats.