Want to know about global warming? Study says you may have to work at it

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March 3, 2009

To be well-informed on complex issues such as global warming, people need to get their information from a diversity of news sources, according to a University of Texas at Austin researcher.

This may be bad news for people who prefer to let information find them.

Assistant Professor of Advertising and Public Relations LeeAnn Kahlor and advertising graduate student Sonny Rosenthal surveyed more than 800 respondents from around the country about the news sources they use to obtain information about global warming. The researchers then measured the complexity of each subject's knowledge of global warming and correlated that with their media use.

The results, published this month in a special issue of Science Communication, showed the number of news sources used, as well as the effort reported to find those sources, are good predictors of accurate global warming knowledge.

One reason for this relationship, according to the authors, is that when people get global warming information from a variety of news sources, they are more likely to expose themselves to different perspectives on the myriad factors affecting global warming.

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