Environmental threat in France: Two studies testing the effect of threatening messages on system justification and environmental denial

Climate change consequences are affecting our entire political, economic and social system. At a psychological level, it represents a large number of threatening events that we have to deal with. In the scientific literature, there is an active debate about the inconsistent effects of environmental threatening messages. One explanation for this inconsistency is that people respond differently to a threat, depending on some psychological dispositions. Indeed, studies on system justification theory showed that when people with a right political orientation are exposed to a threat to their system, they show a motivation to defend it. Although those tendencies have been linked to environmental denial, there is a lack of experimental studies testing the direct effect of environmental threat, especially in European context. We address this issue with two experiments in which we highlighted the environmental threat for one’s system (Study 1, N = 144) and for the continuity of one’s habits (Study 2, N = 148) in a French sample. The design was the same for both studies: three types of video-clips were presented to participants (i.e., control, neutral and threat) and we measured general system justification, environmental denial and political orientation. Our results showed no significant effect of our threat manipulation in both studies. However, they support that a right political orientation in France positively predicts system justification tendencies in study 1 and environmental denial in study 2. Findings are discussed through theoretical and methodological implications.