The Role of Charismatic Leadership Tactics and Inconsistent Messages in Processing and Evaluating Climate Change Information

Abstract

Climate change poses an unprecedented challenge to humanity, and persuasive environmental communication is a crucial step for global leaders to counteract its consequences. Charismatic leaders are especially effective in communicating information. Interestingly, in recent years, there have been frequent incidences where charismatic leaders made inconsistent environmental statements. How people process such inconsistencies can provide key insights into understanding the processing of climate information. In two preregistered online studies (N = 668), we examined how people read and evaluate pro- and contra-environmentalism messages from an environmental, charismatic leader. We found persistent effects of message inconsistencies, leading to longer reading times and lower convincingness ratings for information. However, we failed to find an interaction effect of the experimental manipulations or a main effect of charisma on reading times for environmental messages. In Study 2, we detected an interaction effect of leader charisma and message inconsistency on how convincing participants rated text messages. Participants rated contra-environmental messages as more convincing when following displays of charismatic rather than neutral leader behavior. We discuss future research avenues to explore charismatic leader influences on processing climate change information.