Nick Pidgeon
Biographic Data
| ID | 97069 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nick Pidgeon |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nick |
| FAMILY NAME | Pidgeon |
| SIGNATURE | PIDGEON N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Cardiff University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 100 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1087 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 99 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
A registered report megastudy on the persuasiveness of the most-cited climate messages
Opening reflexive spaces
The value of maps in geographical and social-scientific research as tools that afford imaginative aesthetic engagement with research topics has become increasingly recognised. We explore here, for the first time, the value of these affordances for interviewing experts. In particular, the imaginative engagement maps can provide may help unsettle routines of thought, and invite reflexivity towards the assumptions on which expert knowledge may rest.…
Who pays for carbon dioxide removal? Public perceptions of risk and fairness of enhanced rock weathering in the UK
Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is increasingly recognised as necessary to achieve net zero emissions. Enhanced rock weathering (ERW) is a novel CDR approach with large mitigation potential. With undefined social and environmental costs, and evolving economic and governance systems, ERW raises issues for public acceptance. A literature gap exists regarding how local communities view the possibility of at-scale deployment in their area. We address th…
Understanding residents’ experiences of home, health, and wellbeing in new and novel low carbon homes
As significant contributors to CO2, UK homes must be decarbonized. Active Homes represent a possible route to addressing both societal concerns and policy ambitions, while providing comfortable high quality living environments. However, changes to the material structure of homes have potential implications for people’s ability to live well within them. Our qualitative longitudinal (QL) research as part of the living well in low carbon homes proje…
Leading by example from high-status individuals
Behaviour change has great potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions quickly, helping to prevent dangerous global warming. Some of the most impactful changes are: flying less, eating less meat, driving electric cars, improving home energy efficiency, increased use of public transport and active travel. However, these choices have proved elusive at scale and are rarely encouraged or modelled by high-status individuals (“leaders”), despite estab…
The infrastructural ecologies of industrial decarbonisation
Major changes to land and sea infrastructure are underway to achieve decarbonisation of energy generation and industrial processes. People who live and work locally alongside energy production and industrial sites will most intensely experience the transitions. There are growing calls within the environment and climate change fields, and aligned social justice and policy research, to address how such change risks producing inequalities from the e…
We can't be too saintly”
Low-carbon behaviour change from individuals is both essential for meeting climate change targets and highly politically contentious. Shifting away from activities such as flying, driving and meat eating can greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, yet political leaders have avoided introducing policies to stimulate this for fear of alienating voters and confronting political orthodoxies. This article examines low-carbon behaviour change through …
Question-Led Innovation
When upscaling novel techniques for Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR), public attitudes are crucial, yet there is a serious lack of social science research outside of Western nations. CDR research can clearly benefit from maximising inclusion and opening up to diverse perspectives, including those of local communities, and ideally should involve public insight into the questions we should be prioritising. This paper reports results from a major delibe…
Delivering net zero in the UK
Reducing greenhouse gas emissions to net zero (NZ) as rapidly as possible is imperative to limiting climate change, and this requires an unprecedented transformation of socio-technical-political systems which govern the energy system. To guide this transition, evidence from a broad range of disciplines is needed, yet rarely are experts able to speak with a coordinated voice on the conditions needed to transform the whole system. Here we draw on n…
Where is ‘the local’ in localization? Exploring socio-technical and spatial visions of energy system decarbonization in South Wales
Energy system transition is essential to support global decarbonization, and will involve the increasing use of renewable energy and the socio-technical transformation of centralized, fossil fuel systems alongside changes to how supply and demand is met. Localization represents an emerging vision of how this transformation might occur, but any system transformation will be complex, thanks to the multi-level, polycentric modes of governance that a…
Attuning to ambiguous atmospheres
How atmospheric pollution is perceived by urban dwellers has long been a topic of interest within geography and the social sciences, whether to draw attention to environmental injustices, to better understand the materialities and affects associated with polluted air, or to grasp how people ‘tune in’ to polluted matter. In this paper, we draw on three interrelated geographical and social science literatures on polluted air to inform our explorati…
Deliberating enhanced weathering
Meeting goals for ‘net zero’ emissions may require the removal of previously emitted carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. One proposal, enhanced rock weathering, aims to speed up the weathering processes of rocks by crushing them finely and spreading them on agricultural land. Public perceptions of enhanced rock weathering and its wider social and environmental implications will be a critical factor determining its potential; we use six 2-day deli…
‘This funny place’
Saltmarshes are increasingly recognised for the range of benefits they offer, including coastal protection, flood regulation and carbon sequestration. However, much less is known about how people perceive these environments and their importance for non‐material aspects of human well‐being. As climate change and sea‐level rise render these environments increasingly vulnerable, there is a need to better understand how saltmarshes are valued. This i…
Putting visions in their place
Decarbonizing energy systems by 2050 is an ambitious socio-technical project. Such a transition is likely to have very significant implications for social justice, given the increasing dependence of societies globally on energy services. Eliciting non-expert values and perspectives as part of reflection on the desirability of visions of socio-technical change has long been promoted within RRI. However, RRI has typically focused upstream engagemen…
Living in an Active Home
To meet UK decarbonisation and climate change targets, significant changes to existing and future housing stock will be required. The development of Active Buildings has the potential to contribute to meeting these targets. Active Homes, as a particular type of Active Building, alter how energy is produced, distributed and consumed, as well as how homes are designed, constructed and then lived in. Before occupation, Active Homes are designed and …
Transformational innovation in home energy
Decarbonisation and climate change targets require multiscale sociotechnical energy transitions that include significant changes to housing stock. In the UK, the development of Active Buildings, which directly seek to be efficient energy producers, have zero carbon emissions and provide grid flexibility, has the potential to make a significant contribution to meeting these targets. Active Homes as a particular type of Active Building represent a …
It’s not a very certain future”
Four decades on from the onset of deindustrialisation in the UK and other late-capitalist societies, industrial places are again emerging as key objects of policy discourse. Under the dual pressures of decarbonisation, and the recognition of ‘left behind’ regions as potential hotspots for feelings of political marginalisation, new strategies for clean growth are emerging, aiming to boost local economic and environmental performance. Presenting da…
Valuing Nature for Wellbeing
Contributing to the cultural ecosystem services literature, this paper draws on the in-depth place narratives of two coastal case-study sites in Wales (UK) to explore how people experience and understand landscape change in relation to their sense of place, and what this means for their wellbeing. Our place narratives reveal that participants understand coastal/intertidal landscapes as complex socio-ecological systems filled with competing legiti…
A personas-based approach to deliberating local decarbonisation scenarios
A Missing Link? Capabilities, the Ethics of Care and the Relational Context of Energy Justice
Difficulties experienced in obtaining energy services have been represented as unjust because of how they can prevent people from realising primary human capabilities. Capabilities are relational, being embedded within complex interdependencies between people and socio-material systems. These complexities can cause problems for approaches to energy justice that are based on concepts of welfare rights. We argue that the ethics of care, with its em…
Who cares about Valley people?’ Lived experiences of energy vulnerability in the South Wales Valleys
Energy vulnerability is an area of interest to researchers and policymakers alike. In this article we analyse data from a qualitative longitudinal interview study of a deprived ex-mining community in South Wales to explore lived experiences of energy vulnerability in detail. While demonstrating the relevance of caring responsibilities in experiences of energy use and scarcity, we consider the importance of local relationships in helping people to…
The future is flexible? Exploring expert visions of energy system decarbonisation
Public perceptions of carbon dioxide removal in the United States and the United Kingdom
Incumbency, Trust and the Monsanto Effect
This paper explores factors shaping perceptions of Greenhouse Gas Removal (GGR) amongst a range of informed stakeholders, with a particular focus on their role in future social and political systems. We find considerable ambivalence regarding the role of climate targets and incumbent interests in relation to GGR. Our results suggest that GGR is symbolic of a fundamental debate – occurring not only between separate people, but sometimes within the…
What Counts as Success? Wider Implications of Achieving Planning Permission in a Low-Impact Ecovillage
The need for energy system change in order to address the energy ‘trilemma’ of security, affordability and sustainability is well documented and requires the active involvement of individuals, families and communities who currently engage with these systems and technologies. Alongside technical developments designed to address these challenges, alternative ways of living are increasingly being envisaged by those involved in low-impact development…
International trends in public perceptions of climate change over the past quarter century
Public perceptions of climate change are known to differ between nations and to have fluctuated over time. Numerous plausible characterizations of these variations, and explanations for them, are to be found in the literature. However, a clear picture has not yet emerged as to the principal trends and patterns that have occurred over the past quarter-century or the factors behind these changes. This systematic review considers previous empirical …
Uncertain climate
Framing and communicating climate change
Climate change or nuclear power—No thanks! A quantitative study of public perceptions and risk framing in Britain
Public values for energy system change
In this paper we discuss the importance of framing the question of public acceptance of sustainable energy transitions in terms of values and a ‘whole-system’ lens. This assertion is based on findings arising from a major research project examining public values, attitudes and acceptability with regards to whole energy system change using a mixed-method (six deliberative workshops, n = 68, and a nationally representative survey, n = 2441), interd…
Qualitative research and psychological theorizing
Unlike other disciplines in the human sciences, psychology has undervalued the role of qualitative research methods in scientific inquiry. This has done a disservice to psychology, depriving its practitioners of skills which can simultaneously liberate and discipline the theoretical imagination. 'Grounded theory' is one useful approach to the systematic generation of theory from qualitative data, and alternative criteria can be advanced for judgi…
Messing with nature? Exploring public perceptions of geoengineering in the UK
Anthropogenic influence on the climate – and possible societal responses to it – offers a unique window through which to examine the way people think about and relate to the natural world. This paper reports data from four, one-day deliberative workshops conducted with members of the UK public during early 2012. The workshops focused on geoengineering – the deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment – as one of three possib…
From the familiar to the extraordinary
Nearly two decades since the last nuclear power station was built and began operating in the UK, nuclear energy is firmly back on the political agenda domestically and elsewhere in the world. Yet since the 1980s, little research has investigated perceptions of nuclear power in the UK, particularly those of communities living in very close proximity to such facilities. Using biographical narrative interviews (n = 61), we explore how local resident…
Public engagement with climate change
A long history of interdisciplinary research highlights the powerful role that human values play in shaping individuals' engagement with environmental issues. That certain values are supportive of proenvironmental orientation and behavior is now well established. But as the challenge of communicating the risks of climate change has grown increasingly urgent, there has been a rise in interest around how values shape public engagement with this iss…
Cross‐National Comparisons of Image Associations with “Global Warming” and “Climate Change” Among Laypeople in the United States of America and Great Britain1
Climate change poses significant risks to societies worldwide, yet governmental responses differ greatly on either side of the North Atlantic. Risk perception studies have shown that citizens in the United States and Great Britain have similar risk perceptions of climate change: it is considered a distant threat, of limited personal importance. Engaging the public on this issue is thus challenging. Affect, the positive or negative evaluation of a…
Public perceptions of hydraulic fracturing for shale gas and oil in the United States and Canada
The United States and Canada have been at the forefront of shale oil and gas development via hydraulic fracturing. Understanding public perceptions is important given the role that they may play in future policy decisions in both North America and other parts of the world where shale development is at a much earlier stage. We review 58 articles pertaining to perceptions, published between 2009 and 2015. Studies report mixed levels of awareness of…
Energy justice discourses in citizen deliberations on systems flexibility in the United Kingdom
Seeing futures now
Shale development – extraction of oil and gas from shale rock formations using hydraulic fracturing or ‘fracking’ – has become a critical focus for energy debates in the US and UK. In both countries, potential industry expansion into new areas for shale extraction is expected to produce a wide range of environmental and social impacts and to change the configuration of future energy systems. To engage with emergent views on these complex, multi-s…
Beyond the qualitative paradigm
The case for qualitative research in psychology is considered. We argue against the idea that qualitative research is merely a matter of technique or method, and question the utility of viewing it as a unitary paradigm. Rather, the links between epistemology, methodology, and method are explored within three theorized strands of qualitative inquiry, making reference to illustrative projects. Each strand is organized around a different approach to…
Why mundane energy use matters
Critical moments? Life transitions and energy biographies
Family and youth research has highlighted the importance of lifecourse transitions, illustrating how they can have a substantial impact on people’s everyday lives and anticipated futures. Given their apparent significance, it is surprising that relatively little attention has been paid to life transitions – particularly unexpected ones – to explore how they can impact upon everyday energy use. This is a central concern of Energy Biographies proje…
Acceptance of energy transitions and policies
Perceptions of geoengineering
Geoengineering—the deliberate large‐scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change—is receiving an increasing amount of attention from academics, policy and civil society stakeholders, and members of the general public. This article reviews the available literature on perceptions of geoengineering, including public attitudes and stakeholder perspectives. We describe some of the challenges of engaging wi…
Remaking the Link
Historical and contemporary developments in feminist thinking on theory and method are considered. The critique of positivism is outlined, together with the affinity between feminist research and qualitative methods. Dilemmas are raised concerning: a false dualism between quantity and quality; ethical concerns; and writing in the personal. There are contradictory positions within the contemporary argument for methodological pluralism, such that i…
A personas-based approach to deliberating local decarbonisation scenarios
The British 2001 Foot and Mouth crisis
This mixed methodology study examines public attitudes to risk and its management during the 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) epidemic in Britain. A quantitative survey and qualitative focus groups were conducted to examine how two communities (Norwich and Bude) responded to the crisis. People were more concerned about a broad range of indirect consequences than about the direct (health) impacts of the disease, especially about the effects on th…
It’s not a very certain future”
Four decades on from the onset of deindustrialisation in the UK and other late-capitalist societies, industrial places are again emerging as key objects of policy discourse. Under the dual pressures of decarbonisation, and the recognition of ‘left behind’ regions as potential hotspots for feelings of political marginalisation, new strategies for clean growth are emerging, aiming to boost local economic and environmental performance. Presenting da…
Engaging publics about environmental and technology risks
This paper documents a personal conceptual and methodological journey to develop processes of public engagement and deliberation for use with risk issues. Commencing from the 1995 volume by Ortwin Renn and colleagues on Fairness and Competence in Citizen Participation alongside the 1996 National Academies Understanding Risk report, the paper first describes the parallel development of public engagement thinking within risk communication research …
Ambivalence, naturalness and normality in public perceptions of carbon capture and storage in biomass, fossil energy, and industrial applications in the United Kingdom
Carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) is a promising yet controversial climate change mitigation technology. While numerous studies have addressed perceptions of CCS in fossil energy applications, less attention has been paid to how other applications of the technology may be viewed by lay groups. This article reports on findings from a twoday deliberative focus group held near Drax power station; a coal-biomass co-firing power plant in the no…
Situating local experience of risk
Social Science and the Politics of the Arms Race
Folks don't often try to mix psychology and politics. When they do, there are a number of reasons, including the hunt for interesting data, the wish to be useful to society, and the desire to influence political events. Political involvement itself can assume a number of forms, including helping to shape a political program, helping to sell the program, uncovering the subtle ways in which the opposition has structured public discussion of the iss…
Safety Culture and Risk Management in Organizations
The concept of safety culture arose in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster. It is argued that safety culture represents a new way of conceptualizing processes of risk handling and management in organizational and other contexts. Safety culture provides a global characterization of some of the common behavioral preconditions to disasters and accidents in high-risk sociotechnical systems, and might also prove to be a heuristic tool to aid risk …
Qualitative research and psychological theorizing
Unlike other disciplines in the human sciences, psychology has undervalued the role of qualitative research methods in scientific inquiry. This has done a disservice to psychology, depriving its practitioners of skills which can simultaneously liberate and discipline the theoretical imagination. 'Grounded theory' is one useful approach to the systematic generation of theory from qualitative data, and alternative criteria can be advanced for judgi…
Beyond the qualitative paradigm
The case for qualitative research in psychology is considered. We argue against the idea that qualitative research is merely a matter of technique or method, and question the utility of viewing it as a unitary paradigm. Rather, the links between epistemology, methodology, and method are explored within three theorized strands of qualitative inquiry, making reference to illustrative projects. Each strand is organized around a different approach to…
Remaking the Link
Historical and contemporary developments in feminist thinking on theory and method are considered. The critique of positivism is outlined, together with the affinity between feminist research and qualitative methods. Dilemmas are raised concerning: a false dualism between quantity and quality; ethical concerns; and writing in the personal. There are contradictory positions within the contemporary argument for methodological pluralism, such that i…
The conjunction fallacy
A study was conducted to evaluate the effects of training on the incidence of the conjunction fallacy. One group received training in the extension rule (normative), the other training which stressed that judgments should be based on similarity or representativeness (non‐normative). Participants receiving the former made fewer errors, those receiving the latter made more errors. However, multiple regression analysis showed that under both trainin…
The social amplification of risk
More than a decade has elapsed since the introduction in 1988 of the social amplification of risk framework (SARF) by researchers from Clark University (Kasperson, Kasperson, Renn, and colleagues) and Decision Research (Slovic and colleagues). During that time various researchers have enlisted the framework to complete a substantial number of empirical studies. All the while, the emergence of a much larger body of relevant knowledge has spawned a…
Grounded theory in psychological research
The Social Amplification of Risk
The management of and communication about risks has become a major question of public policy and intellectual debate in the modern world. The social amplification of risk framework describes how both social and individual factors act to amplify or dampen perceptions of risk and through this create secondary effects such as stigmatisation of technologies, economic losses or regulatory impacts. This volume, edited by three of the world's leading an…
Exploring the Dimensionality of Trust in Risk Regulation
This article investigates possible differential levels of trust in government regulation across five different risk contexts and the relationship between a number of concepts that might be thought of as comprising distinctive "dimensions" of trust. It appeared that how people perceive government and its policies toward risk regulation was surprisingly similar for each of the five risk cases. A principal-component analysis showed that the various …
Trust, the Asymmetry Principle, and the Role of Prior Beliefs
Within the risk literature there is an ongoing debate on whether trust is vulnerable or enduring. Previous research on nuclear energy by Slovic in 1993 has shown that negative events have much greater impact on self‐reported trust than do positive events. Slovic attributes this to the asymmetry principle: specifically, that trust is much easier to destroy than to create. In a questionnaire survey concerning genetically modified (GM) food in Brita…
Critical trust
The binary opposition of trusting or not trusting is inadequate to understand the often ambiguous and contradictory ideas people possess about risk regulators, particularly when knowledge and experience of such institutions is limited. The paper reports qualitative and quantitative data from a major study of public perceptions (n = 30 focus groups) of UK risk regulators. We compare the complex and widely different ‘trust profiles’ of two regulato…
The British 2001 Foot and Mouth crisis
This mixed methodology study examines public attitudes to risk and its management during the 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) epidemic in Britain. A quantitative survey and qualitative focus groups were conducted to examine how two communities (Norwich and Bude) responded to the crisis. People were more concerned about a broad range of indirect consequences than about the direct (health) impacts of the disease, especially about the effects on th…
Trust in Risk Regulation
Although there is ample empirical evidence that trust in risk regulation is strongly related to the perception and acceptability of risk, it is less clear what the direction of this relationship is. This article explores the nature of the relationship, using three separate data sets on perceptions of genetically modified (GM) food among the British public. The article has two discrete but closely interrelated objectives. First, it compares two mo…
Difficulties in evaluating public engagement initiatives
In the realm of risk management, and policy-making more generally, “public engagement” is often advocated as an antidote to pathologies associated with traditional methods of policy-making, and associated deficit-model-driven communication strategies. The actual benefits of public engagement are, however, difficult to establish without thorough evaluation of specific engagement processes. Unfortunately, rigorous evaluation is difficult, and, perh…
On evaluating the GM Nation? Public debate about the commercialisation of transgenic crops in Britain
The public debate about GM crops that took place in Britain in 2002–03 was an unprecedented experiment for the UK in public engagement. The Government, which sponsored the exercise, made a pledge: to take into account lay perspectives, as well as the views of its expert advisers, when making a decision about the possible commercialisation of this controversial technology. As officially accredited but independent evaluators of the debate, we were …
Cross‐National Comparisons of Image Associations with “Global Warming” and “Climate Change” Among Laypeople in the United States of America and Great Britain1
Climate change poses significant risks to societies worldwide, yet governmental responses differ greatly on either side of the North Atlantic. Risk perception studies have shown that citizens in the United States and Great Britain have similar risk perceptions of climate change: it is considered a distant threat, of limited personal importance. Engaging the public on this issue is thus challenging. Affect, the positive or negative evaluation of a…
A Comparison of Responses to Internet and Postal Surveys in a Public Engagement Context
Involving the public in policy setting, or public engagement, is becoming increasingly popular in many democratic societies. Among the various ways of enacting engagement, the use of the Internet to either collect opinions or conduct public debate is seen as holding out great promise. However, the benefits of using the Internet over other communication media are uncertain because empirical research is limited. This article describes a comparison …
Situating local experience of risk
The GM Debate
This book tells the story of an unprecedented experiment in public participation: the government-sponsored debate on the possible commercialization of ‘GM’ crops in the UK. Giving a unique and systematic account of the debate process, this revealing volume sets it within its political and intellectual contexts, and examines the practical implications for future public engagement initiatives. The authors, an experienced team of researchers, produc…
Opening up nanotechnology dialogue with the publics
Public participation is becoming increasingly popular with emerging health technologies, such as nanotechnologies, which may pose novel ethical, social or risk issues in the future. Nanotechnologies represent an important test case for so-called ‘upstream’ engagement: that is public participation before significant research and development has taken place and before establishment of firm public attitudes or social representations about an issue. …
Moving engagement “upstream”? Nanotechnologies and the Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering's inquiry
In response to the impetus that is gathering in the UK for upstream public engagement, we analyze the impacts of the Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering report of 2004 on Nanoscience and Nanotechnologies: Opportunities and Uncertainties. The paper presents an analysis of 24 interviews with stakeholders to the nanotechnology debate. It uses these to discuss the inquiry process and the recommendations contained within the report, as well…
Introduction
Climate change or nuclear power—No thanks! A quantitative study of public perceptions and risk framing in Britain
The ethics of socio-cultural risk research
In socio-cultural risk research, an epistemological tension often follows if real hazards in the world are juxtaposed against the essentially socially constructed nature of all risk. In this editorial, we consider how this paradox is manifest at a practical level in a number of ethical dilemmas for the risk researcher. (1) In terms of strategies for seeking informed consent, and for addressing the power inequalities involved in interpretative and…
Political science (70 works) · Sociology (59 works) · Psychology (54 works) · Climate Change Communication and Perception (44 works) · Risk Perception and Management (40 works) · Public relations (39 works) · Geography (32 works) · Computer Science (31 works) · Social Acceptance of Renewable Energy (30 works) · Economics (29 works)