This doctoral research investigates the role of scientific elites in influencing concern for the test issue of global warming. An extensive literature suggests that elites are influential in shaping attitudes on a wide range of issues, such that opinion tends to move in the direction of elite consensus and polarize when elites are divided. This literature typically focuses on partisan elites. However scientists, as non-partisan elites, may be equally influential in shaping attitudes, especially for issues where scientific opinion is central to policy debates. Little attention has been paid to the influence of such scientific elites.

This research experimentally investigates the hypothesis that elite scientific agreement is a mediating variable that affects cognitive message processing. That is, when perceived scientific agreement is high, scientific evidence strength will influence attitudes, and when perceived scientific agreement is low, such evidence strength should not be influential. A content analysis of newspaper coverage of global warming provides additional context for these findings.

The findings suggest that perceived scientific agreement is strongly related to concern for global warming. Further, media attention to this issue contains important variations in portrayed levels of scientific agreement that may influence public perceptions of overall scientific agreement. Under conditions of high cognitive engagement, experimental subjects were able to successfully evaluate scientific evidence strength. However, in a more naturalistic setting, evidence strength did not impact concern. Additionally, elite scientific arguments for global warming appear to be highly politicized. Such cues appear to influence cognition, as they do in other elite debates, by activating the importance of political beliefs in attitude formation.

The finding that objectively stronger evidence for the existence of global warming had no impact on public concern has interesting implications for the public dialogue on this issue. It suggests that many members of the public have fixed opinions, despite the fact that most adults know extremely little about global warming. Thus, public attitudes may be determined absent real information, either because such information is not comprehensible to the public, or because such information is not viewed as important.


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