Seeing is believing or believing is seeing: divergent pathways to climate action and policy support following extreme weather events

Do extreme weather event experiences shape individual climate actions and policy preferences? Some social science theory suggests that personal exposure to such events gives rise to beliefs that spur climate change actions and/or policy support (“seeing is believing”). Alternative theory suggests that beliefs about climate change instead shape event interpretation (“believing is seeing”), attenuating responses for non-believers. Research about how extreme weather events influence actions and policy preferences is inconclusive and sometimes contradictory. We apply Structural Equation Modelling, an approach well-suited to disentangling complex relationships, to survey data from two distinct states – Alabama ( n = 916) and Oregon ( n = 1306) – that experienced different extreme weather events (hurricanes and wildfires, respectively). We show that support for climate policies is tied to both general and event-specific climate concerns, while actions are associated with harm experiences, descriptive norms, and event-specific climate concerns. Our findings have implications for climate communications and policymaking.