Risk in Context: How Weather Influences Consumer Responses to Climate Risk

Protecting homes from increasing climate hazards depends in part on consumers’ understandingand acting on objective climate risk information. Yet such information is not interpreted inisolation. Interpretation may be influenced by immediate contextual cues. This research examineshow weather conditions, as one example of relevant contextual cues, influence consumers’responses to property-level climate risk information. Pairing website visit data from an onlineplatform providing flood risk information with the weather data at users’ location, we demonstratethat weather is associated with interest in personal climate-hazard risk. Specifically, visits to thewebsite increase following periods of rainfall and decline during extended dry spells at the users’locations. Beyond generating interest in climate-hazard risks, we show in four experiments thatweather moderates the effect of objective climate-hazard risk on consumers’ judgments. Whenweather conditions contradict the objective risk, consumers’ judgments shift away from the directionimplied by the objective risk information. In contrast, when weather aligns with the objectiverisk, weather effects are mostly absent. These effects also trickle down to consumers’ willingnessto adopt protective measures. These findings advance our understanding of consumers’ evaluationof risks by showing that heterogeneity in risk perception and protection motivation can emergefrom an asymmetric integration of objective risk information and immediate contextual cues dependingon whether the signals align or not.