Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2025 Apr 22;15(1):12989.
doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-96714-z.

A thematic analysis of what Australians state would change their minds on climate change

Amy S G Lee  1 , Kelly Kirkland  2   3 , Samantha K Stanley  4   5 , Abby Robinson  2 , Zoe Leviston  6   7 , Iain Walker  2   7
Affiliations

A thematic analysis of what Australians state would change their minds on climate change

Amy S G Lee et al. Sci Rep. .

Abstract

What do Australians believe would change their current opinions about climate change? In this study, we used audience segmentation analysis through the Six Americas Short Survey to identify groups of climate opinion holders within a representative sample of Australians. We had 4857 participants tell us what it would take to change their current opinions about climate change and leveraged OpenAI's Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) to identify the presence or absence of themes (Nothing, Evidence and Information, Trusted Sources, Action, and Unsure) and subthemes in their responses. GPT performed at near-human levels, proving to be a highly useful tool for thematic analysis. Our analyses revealed that strong climate denialists and believers tended to display greater dogmatism, with increased likelihood of stating that nothing would change their mind and lower likelihood of being unsure. Results also highlighted the need for diverse forms of evidence and information and the importance of trusted sources of information across audience segments. These findings provide support for GPT's utility in managing large datasets in the social sciences and offer participant-informed insights into climate opinion change.

Keywords: Audience segmentation; Chat GPT; Climate change; Large language models; Opinion change; Six Americas.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Declarations. Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Standardized proportion of major themes across responses from each SASSY segment. Note Details for irrelevant responses coded to N/A are presented in the Supplementary Materials (Fig. S1).
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Standardized proportion of subthemes in responses coded to Evidence and Information from each SASSY segment.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Standardized proportion of subthemes in responses coded to Trusted Sources from each SASSY segment.
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Standardized proportion of subthemes in responses coded to Action from each SASSY segment.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Kulp, S. A. & Strauss, B. H. New elevation data triple estimates of global vulnerability to sea-level rise and coastal flooding. Nat. Commun.10, 4844. 10.1038/s41467-019-12808-z (2019). - PMC - PubMed
    1. IPCC. Summary for policymakers in Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (eds. Lee, H. & Romero, J.) (2023). https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_SYR_SPM.pdf
    1. Bradley, G. L., Babutsidze, Z., Chai, A. & Reser, J. P. The role of climate change risk perception, response efficacy, and psychological adaptation in pro-environmental behavior: A two nation study. J. Env. Psych.68, 101410. 10.1016/j.jenvp.2020.101410 (2020).
    1. Hagen, B., Middel, A. & Pijawka, D. European climate change perceptions: Public support for mitigation and adaptation policies. Env. Policy Gov.26 (3), 170–183. 10.1002/eet.1701 (2015).
    1. Singh, A. S., Zwickle, A., Bruskotter, J. T. & Wilson, R. The perceived psychological distance of climate change impacts and its influence on support for adaptation policy. Env. Sci. Policy 73, 93–99. 10.1016/j.envsci.2017.04.011 (2017).

Supplementary concepts

LinkOut - more resources