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People who hold authoritarian views or endorse unequal social hierarchies are less willing to make sacrifices for the environment than the average person. These findings come from a study of thousands of people in New Zealand.

Samantha Stanley at the University of Canberra and her colleagues looked at the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study, a nationally representative study of social attitudes, personality and health collected over a 20-year period.

Previous research has found that support for social dominance – the idea that it is right for some groups to be dominant over others – is linked to support for environmental exploitation and denial of climate change. Additionally, research has found people who hold authoritarian views are more likely to see climate change as less of a risk.


Stanley and her team were interested in how these views change over time.

By analysing the data from the 20-year study, they found that people with greater support for social dominance were least likely to develop pro-environmental views. And on the flip side, people who did become willing to make sacrifices for the environment were also the people who started off as pro-equality, says Stanley.

Similarly, the team found people with authoritarian views were less likely to be willing to make sacrifices for the environment.

Tracking individuals over time as this study did is the next best thing to running an experiment, says Brock Bastian at the University of Melbourne.

Journal reference: PLOS ONE , DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0219067