Abstract:

Climate change is one of the most urgent issues that the whole world is facing. The "knowledge deficit theory", which has been used as the basis for government policy-making for many decades, is critiqued for being too simple. Recently, some scholars raised a new idea that there might be a link between one’s metacognition of climate change and his/her pro-environmental attitude and behaviour (Scannell & Grouzet, 2010). Based on their and Petty's classify of metacognition, this article reviews recent studies and theories in four dimensions: the confidence in one's knowledge level about climate change risk (metacognition knowledge), the judgment one makes about where his/her ideas of climate change risk come from (metacognition origin), the judgment of the likelihood of a given climate change outcome (metacognition certainty) and the weight or importance one places on the cognition of climate change (metacognition importance) and finds: (1) There is often a mismatch between public's actual knowledge and their metacognition knowledge. A lot of people, who are more or less overconfident on their knowledge level about the climate change, may engage in actions they believe are helpful but objectively are not, and reluctant to make further information-seeking effect. (2) Since climate change is a statistic trend, it is too hard to be detected by one’s personal experience, most people learn about this kind of risk from climate scientists and their social amplifier's description, so public’s risk perception is mainly oriented by analytic system rather than experience system. The analytic system, which requires justification via logic and evidence, cannot create a sense of urgency and unlikely to motivate immediately actions; and virtual reality technology used in some disaster movies does activated the experience system, but their effects still remain to be elucidated. (3) While reading climate change reports, people usually pay more attention to the gist of the information instead of details, so they would be insensitive to the increased degree of certainty. At the same time, mass media's discontinuance reports and "balanced" reporting journalistic norm also reduced public's certainty of climate change risk. (4) People generally consider climate change an event that will happen in the future and on the other side of the world, so they construed it in more abstract terms and have most cognitive resources allocate to present event. According to the theory of discounting, people usually have a strong present bias, they strongly prefer immediate benefits and dislike present costs relative to delayed options, so the future benefits of pro-environmental behavior is discounted. In this way, the metacognition importance of climate change is diminished while comparing to other current events. All these metacognitive elements become psychology barriers standing in the way of behavior change that would help to limit CO2 emission, no wonder over years the overall condition of climate change do not change much. Finally, the future trends of research in metacognition of climate change risk are discussed. How to make full use of the fruitful achievements in the metacognition field to promote public's pro-environmental behaviour is of great importance.

Key words: Climate change risk, metacognitive knowledge, metacognitve origin, metacognitve certainty, metacognitive importance

摘要：

气候变化已经成为全球面临的最紧迫问题之一。近期研究发现，个体对于气候变化风险的元认知和其亲环境行为之间关系密切。对元认知知识、元认知来源、元认知确定性及元认知重要性四个维度相关研究的分析表明，公众元认知知识与实际知识的偏离、以分析系统为主导的风险认知来源、对气候变化后果确定性的低估以及对气候变化重要性的忽视都会抑制环境友好行为的发生，并指出了气候变化风险元认知研究的未来趋势。

关键词: 气候变化风险, 元认知知识, 元认知来源, 元认知确定性, 元认知重要性