Most of us know climate change is a serious problem, but many of us don’t believe it will affect us personally, according to a major study published in the journal Nature Sustainability. A team from the University of Gothenburg has put hard numbers on this psychological blind spot and the findings have real consequences for how humanity responds to the climate crisis.
Researchers analysed 83 separate studies involving more than 70,000 participants across 17 countries. The results were striking: 65% of participants rated their own risk of being affected by climate change as lower than that of other people. In other words, almost two thirds of people essentially believe they will be more sheltered from climate impacts than those around them, which, statistically, cannot be true for the majority.
“The studies we have compiled do not measure people’s actual risk. We cannot determine whether individual risk assessments are overly optimistic, but at the group level we clearly see that the majority perceive their own risk as lower than that of others,” said Magnus Bergquist, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Gothenburg.
One of the more nuanced findings concerns who people are comparing themselves against when they make these judgements. When people measured their risk against broad groups, including fellow citizens, or humanity as a whole, the distortion was greatest. The effect was found across Europe, the United States and Asia, but was most pronounced among Europeans, and in countries where the overall level of climate risk is lower.
Of the 83 studies reviewed, 81 showed participants rating their own risk as lower than average. The two exceptions were telling: both involved farmers in China and South Korea who had directly experienced the consequences of climate change firsthand. “We found the effect in all but two studies, where participants were farmers in China and South Korea who had been directly exposed to the consequences of climate change. This suggests that direct experience reduces the effect,” explained Pär Bjälkebring, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Gothenburg.
In other words, once climate change stops being an abstract concept and starts affecting your crops, your land or your livelihood, the psychological distance collapses.
This isn’t just an interesting quirk of human psychology. The way people perceive risk directly shapes whether they support climate action, change their behaviour, or push for stronger policies. If most people quietly assume the worst effects will land on someone else, the urgency to act is easily lost.
“Even when people recognise the real risks posed by climate change, many seem to perceive these risks as primarily affecting others. This is a psychological bias that, in the worst case, can slow down both climate adaptation and mitigation efforts,” warned Bergquist.
The findings suggest that making climate change feel local, personal and immediate, rather than distant and abstract, may be one of the most important challenges facing climate communicators today.
Sandlund, I., Bjälkebring, P. & Bergquist, M. Meta-analytical evidence of a self–other discrepancy in climate change-related risk perceptions. Nat Sustain 9, 377–384 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-025-01717-3