Conflict or climate action? People’s destructive and constructive collective responses to climate threat

Climate change is discussed as a global security risk, eliciting intergroup conflict. While this has often been attributed to increasing realistic intergroup conflict over natural resources becoming scarcer, more recent research suggests a complementary and catalytic psychological process of automatic threat defense. According to group-based control theory, people respond to threat by increased identification with agentic ingroups and group-based action. Thus, reflecting on threatening climate change can lead to attitudes and behavior that trigger and catalyze intergroup conflict. At the same time, increased group-based motivation may drive people to contribute to collective goal attainment, such as collective climate action. We review this emerging research line and discuss implications for climate-related intergroup conflict and the possibility of collective climate action.