People vary in climate change skepticism and in their views on disaster cause and prevention. For example, the United States boasts higher rates of climate skepticism than other countries, especially among Republicans. Research into the individual differences that shape variation in climate-related beliefs represents an important opportunity for those seeking ways to mitigate climate change and climate-related disasters (e.g., floods). In this registered report, we proposed a study examining how individual difference in physical formidability, worldview, and affect relate to attitudes about disaster and climate change. We predicted that highly formidable men would tend to endorse social inequality, hold status quo defensive worldviews, report lower levels of empathy, and report attitudes that promote disaster risk accumulation via lesser support for social intervention. The results of an online study (Study 1) support the notion that men’s self-perceived formidability is related to disaster and climate change beliefs in the predicted direction and that this relationship is mediated by hierarchical worldview and status quo defense but not empathy. An analysis of a preliminary sample for the in-lab study (Study 2) suggests that self-perceived formidability relates to disaster views, climate views, and status quo maintaining worldviews.

Katz and King have previously proposed a statistical model for multiparty election data. They argue that ordinary least-squares (OLS) regression is inappropriate when the dependent variable measures the share of the vote going to each party, and they recommend a superior technique. Regrettably, the Katz-King model requires a high level of statistical expertise and is computationally demanding for more than three political parties. We offer a sophisticated yet convenient alternative that involves seemingly unrelated regression (SUR). SUR is nearly as easy to use as OLS yet performs as well as the Katz-King model in predicting the distribution of votes and the composition of parliament. Moreover, it scales easily to an arbitrarily large number of parties. The model has been incorporated into Clarify, a statistical suite that is available free on the Internet.