Charged but Not Activated: Attitude-Behaviour Gaps in Energy Infrastructure Responses

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Methodologically robust cross-national experiment on attitude-behaviour gaps in energy acceptance, offering insights for empirical social science research.

🏢実務担当者:Useful for energy companies and communicators to design engagement strategies that go beyond measuring attitudes and target actual behaviour.

🏛政策担当者:Highlights the need for policies that facilitate active public participation, not just acceptance, in energy infrastructure siting.

Public responses to energy infrastructure are commonly assessed through attitudinal measures of acceptance, yet less is known about whether these evaluations translate into civic engagement. Using a preregistered cross-national vignette experiment across six European countries (N = 9,026), we examined both dimensions. Respondents evaluated a proposed local power plant – solar, wind, nuclear, or an unspecified sustainable project – and reported willingness to engage in civic actions varying in effort, or to select explicit inaction. Technology effects on attitudes are pronounced: solar and wind receive substantially higher support than nuclear across all countries. In contrast, behavioural engagement varies little across technologies. Where engagement occurs, it concentrates in low-effort actions, while medium- and high-effort mobilisation remains rare. Neutral respondents exhibit the highest explicit inaction, indicating limited mobilisation in the absence of a clear evaluative stance. Attitudinal differentiation across energy technologies thus translates only weakly into behavioural engagement, which is structured primarily by evaluative stance and effort thresholds.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/txm7e_v1first seen 2026-07-30 05:16:04