Ricerc@Sapienza

The research aims to explore the social construction of attitudes, opinions and readiness for action with respect to climate change. The basic hypothesis is that in facing environmental risks, especially when the consequences could be as much dramatical and global as in the case of climate change, a social organization of denial takes place, based also on emotional dynamics. Therefore, a large gap can be observed between the extreme seriuosness of the problem and the level of awareness and involvement of public opinion and political debate. The purpose of the research is to reduce this gap, starting with a better understanding of the interplay between cognitive, emotional and socio-cultural processes in which the social organization of denial is rooted. In particular, the focus will be on the communication, with reference to both mainstream media and digital networks, in order to find a better way to cope with social denial and to foster a more active engagement. In addition to the usual analysis of social discourse, multimodal analyzes will be set up to show the connection between communication styles and emotional resonances, and communication flows in social networks will be explored through agent-based computational models.