Zhang Jin, Liu Yong
Department of Ideology and Political Education, Maxism School, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China.
Department of Political Economics, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China.
Front Psychol. 2022 Jun 29;13:943952. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.943952. eCollection 2022.
CEOs' personal experiences can influence their perceptions of climate change and their firms' pro-environmental behavior; a concept termed the experience-perception link. Thus, the experience of the recent COVID-19 pandemic may have caused a change in CEOs' perceptions of another global threat-climate change. We test this hypothesis by comparing survey measures of climate risk perceptions, self-efficacy, and pro-environmental behaviors among 605 randomly selected CEOs in Wuhan across three phases-(1) before, (2) after the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, and (3) after the COVID-19 had been primarily controlled in Wuhan but was declared a pandemic by the WHO. Harnessing between- and within-subjects variation in COVID-19 exposure, we find a substantial increase in climate change beliefs and actions after the COVID-19 evolved from an epidemic to a pandemic, regardless of subjects' exposure to the pandemic. We also demonstrate that this change is due to the salience of the global crisis and the feeling of hope elicited by observing effective responses to the crisis, rather than personal experiences solely made from a local health crisis. Our results reveal unexpectedly positive side effects of the abrupt shifts in CEOs' beliefs and their firms' pro-environmental behaviors in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
首席执行官的个人经历会影响他们对气候变化的认知以及公司的环保行为；这一概念被称为经验-认知联系。因此，近期新冠疫情的经历可能导致首席执行官们对另一个全球威胁——气候变化的认知发生了变化。我们通过比较武汉605名随机挑选的首席执行官在三个阶段的气候风险认知、自我效能感和环保行为的调查指标来检验这一假设，这三个阶段分别是：（1）之前，（2）武汉新冠疫情爆发后，以及（3）武汉的新冠疫情基本得到控制但世界卫生组织宣布其为大流行病之后。利用新冠疫情暴露的组间和组内差异，我们发现，在新冠疫情从地方性流行病演变为大流行病之后，无论这些首席执行官是否亲身经历了疫情，他们对气候变化的信念和行动都大幅增加。我们还证明，这种变化是由于全球危机的突出性以及观察到对危机的有效应对所引发的希望感，而不仅仅是源于地方健康危机的个人经历。我们的研究结果揭示了首席执行官信念的突然转变以及他们的公司为应对新冠疫情而采取的环保行为所带来的意外积极副作用。
