Most people think climate change will primarily affect other people, a new analysis of previously published research reveals.

The findings illustrate a well-known cognitive bias known as “overoptimism,” specifically a variety called “overplacement,” which describes how people tend to rate their own risks as less likely and less severe than those of others.

This tendency can make people less likely to take action to reduce their own risks by, say, quitting smoking or getting vaccinated. Overly optimistic risk perceptions could also make people less likely to support climate action, the researchers say.

“Many people may ask themselves: how likely is it that I will suffer the consequences of extreme weather events compared to others?” says study team member Magnus Bergquist, a psychologist at Gothenburg University in Sweden. “What we found was that the vast majority of people, worldwide, expect that others are more likely to suffer from such consequences than themselves.”

Bergquist and his collaborators conducted a meta-analysis of 83 studies involving a total of more than 70,000 people from 17 countries who were surveyed about their perceptions of climate-related risks faced by themselves and other people.

The analysis reveals that in general, people perceive climate change as more likely to affect others rather than themselves. The pattern holds regardless of whether people are asked about risks from extreme weather events or from climate change in general.

In 81 of the 83 studies, participants rated their own vulnerability as lower than that of others or lower than average. Statistical analysis suggests that in 68% of cases, people think their own climate change-related risk is lower than that of others.

“We were surprised by the consistency and strength of the effect,” Bergquist says.

The optimism bias was most pronounced in studies conducted in the lowest-risk region (Europe) and least pronounced in the highest-risk region (Asia). And in the two studies where the effect was not seen, participants were farmers in China and South Korea who had experienced the consequences of climate change first-hand.

The underlying studies don’t capture information about participants’ individual climate-related risk, so there’s no way to know whether people’s assessment of their own relative risk is accurate. That’s a question for future research.

Instead, the point of the current analysis is that at the group level, the majority of people think their own climate risk is below average. That is, it’s about documenting a psychological phenomenon that could make climate action more challenging.

Still, the framing of these questions matters. People are more likely to say their climate risk is lower than that of others when the context is a broad comparison with fellow citizens of their country or with humanity as a whole. The tendency towards overoptimism less pronounced when people compare their own risk to that of specific others, such as neighbors or people in their city.

That finding suggests a strategy for communicating about climate change: reduce the tendency to overoptimism by framing climate risks relation to specific groups rather than, say, humanity as a whole. This, too, will need to be tested in future studies, Bergquist says.

Source: Sandlund I., et al. “Meta-analytical evidence of a self-other discrepancy in climate change-related risk perceptions.” Nature Sustainability 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine.