Today we review the paper titled, I Share, Therefore I Am: A U.S.−China Comparison of College Students’ Motivations to Share Information About Climate Change by Yang, Kahlor, and Griffin (2014).
I Share, Therefore I Am examines the motivations behind information sharing among undergraduate students at four universities, two each in the US and China. The authors investigate the importance of several factors, including social norms, information insufficiency, and risk perceptions including its importance (p. 115–117). These factors can be found in the Risk Information Seeking and Processing (RISP) model. The current study also considers the relationship between information seeking and sharing (p. 119).
The authors of the paper are Z. Janet Yang, Lee Ann Kahlor, and Darrin J. Griffin.
Z. Janet Yang is a Professor of Communications at SUNY Buffalo. She writes about risk information seeking behavior around health and environmental threats like climate change, natural disasters, and disease outbreaks. Yang has a Ph.D. in Communications from Cornell University.
Lee Ann Kahlor is a Professor in the School of Advertising and Public Relations at UT Austin. She also studies risk information behavior and developed the PRISM model used in other studies (Kahlor, 2010). She has written on topics such as television and gender violence, science and health communication, and their relationship to cultural diversity. Kahlor has a Ph.D. in Mass Communication from University of Wisconsin-Madison and edits the journal, Science Communication.
Darrin J. Griffin is an Associate Professor of Communications and Director of the Communication and Applied Theory Research Laboratory at the University of Alabama. He writes on education, deaf culture, and deception in communication. He has a Ph.D. in Communications from SUNY Buffalo.
The study gathered 1,381 responses in spring, 2011. In addition to the factors listed above, the survey captured age, gender, ethnicity, and income. Their examples of climate-related risks included disease outbreaks and threats to clean water. The survey also asked about information source usage, such as news media, governments, environmental groups, scientists, power companies, and family and friends (p. 122–123).
The study found information sharing was correlated with:
- Social norms
- Information seeking
- More current knowledge among American students, but only among those with higher confidence in their knowledge level
- Less current knowledge among Chinese students
- Negative feelings like worry (but not rational assessment of climate risk)
- Underrepresented ethnic groups, but only in the US (p. 124–126)
Of these, social norms and information seeking had the strongest relationship with sharing. That is, people who felt expected to be informed about climate change and perceived others as knowledgeable were more likely to engage in sharing (or at least indicate they would on a survey).
While both rational risk assessment and negative emotion affected sharing, the latter had more impact in the US than in China. The authors suggest this may be due to the impersonal nature of climate risk and also cultural differences (p. 128).
They conclude with some practical advice, such as leveraging social norms and emotional activation to encourage social sharing about climate change (p. 130). This might look something like, “Your friends are informed about the climate crisis and think you should be too.”
The motivation for studying climate risk information behavior is to help health and science communicators better motivate the public to action. Empirical testing of the RISP model has typically assumed the flow of information is one-way. An individual can encounter information about climate change and might be motivated to seek more, but in either case they are they are not considered a source of information:
Beyond information sharing through hierarchical structures from the sources to the receivers, when information sharing occurs in recursive directions… it can contribute to information exchange, which can subsequently lead to more optimized distribution of resources… or a more informed public (italics original, p. 114).
This paper raises the prospect that we might have something to learn about climate change from one another, not just directly from experts. Even further, it suggests the possibility that experts might have something to learn from the experience of people directly affected by a changing climate.
References
Kahlor, L. (2010). PRISM: A planned risk information seeking model. Health Communication, 25(4), 345–356. https://doi.org/10.1080/10410231003775172
Yang, Z. J., Kahlor, L. A., & Griffin, D. J. (2014). I share, therefore I am: A US−China comparison of college students’ motivations to share information about climate change. Human Communication Research, 40(1), 112–135. https://doi.org/10.1111/hcre.12018