Oxford Events, the new replacement for OxTalks, will launch on 16th March. The two-week OxTalks freeze period starts on Monday 2nd March. During this time, there will be no facility to publish or edit events. The existing OxTalks site will remain available to view during this period. Once Oxford Events launches, you will need a Halo login to submit events. Full details are available on the Staff Gateway.
Support or opposition for policies can be determined both by social motives and by (possibly misinformed) reasoning about them. For example, carbon pricing is often promoted as a key climate policy by economists, but remains relatively unpopular among the general public. In this study, we conduct an online survey experiment with a representative sample of U.S. adults (N = 2,685) to investigate the causal impact of social norms and economic reasoning on public support for carbon pricing. Using exogenously assigned video interventions that embed norm information or policy explanation, we show that, immediately after exposure, both types of information increase support for carbon pricing by around 5 percentage points. A follow-up survey more than 4 months later reveals that this initial increase fades away, but that a combined norm and policy explanation intervention retains a significant negative effect on the share of individuals who strongly oppose carbon pricing. Interestingly, we observe no initial effects on incentivized environmental donations, and a significant decrease in (large) donations in the follow-up. One-shot interventions like ours may thus constitute a first step in overcoming public resistance, but struggle to foster persistent engagement.
