Climate change as a societal challenge. A trans-disciplinary analysis

Climate change is a defining issue of 21st century, whose complexity urges to transcend disciplinary boundaries and to develop innovative multi-, inter-, and ideally trans-disciplinary studies, able to face the challenges posed by grand societal matters to single theoretical and methodological precincts. This contribution aims to illustrate an ongoing multidisciplinary study on socio-psychological processes involved in the social construction of knowledge about the topic, starting from the observation of a large gap between the extreme seriousness of the problem and the level of awareness in the public arena. Our basic hypothesis is that in facing environmental risks, when the consequences could be highly dramatical and global as in the case of climate change, a social organization of self-censorship or even a denial take place, which are based on communicative processes and emotional dynamics. In order to understand the interplay between cognitive, emotional and socio-cultural processes involved in social organization of self-censorship and denial, the study analyzes a wide range of communicative contexts, like political debates, mainstream media contents and online exchanges, using a mix of methods, including lexicometric and text-mining analysis of large textual corpora, multimodal analyses of communication, and also experimental study of emotional and cognitive reactions to different communication styles. Drawing on the integrated outcome of these methods, the current contribution will foster the developing of new theoretical and methodological frameworks, able to grasp the connection between communication styles, emotional resonances, and communication flows at individual, interpersonal and societal levels.