How people update their beliefs about climate change : An experimental investigation of the optimistic update bias and how to reduce it
People usually update their beliefs selectively in response to good news and disregard bad news. Here, we investigated in two preregistered experiments (N = 278 and N = 306) (1) whether such valence-dependent belief updating also underlies information processing in the context of climate change and (2) whether it can be altered by interventions informing about different aspects of climate change.
