Local Positivity Bias

A 2026 YouGov survey found that while a majority of Americans believe that climate change will cause “serious economic damage and mass displacement,” most of those respondents also believe it’s unlikely to impact them directly in any significant manner.

The numbers are highly skewed across the board between Democrats and Republicans, the vast majority of the former, 82%, saying that they think serious damage will be done to the global economy as a result of climate change, while only 29% of Republicans believe the same. The gaps between responses were similar to questions about the mass displacement of people, cities being lost to rising sea levels, and the extinction of the human race (though on that last one, both parties were a lot less likely to say they believed humanity would be wiped out by climate change: around 38% and 10%, respectively).

About a third of all Americans said that they’ve reconsidered their lifestyle choices, including those related to travel, diet, and transportation because of climate change, and nearly as many (31%) said they’ve reconsidered decisions about where to live for the same reason. About 15% of all Americans, and 26% of adults under the age of 30, said that they’ve reconsidered whether to have children because of climate change and its anticipated impacts.

Looping back to that initial question of whether climate change will impact respondents personally, though, a majority of Americans—about 65%—said they believed climate change will harm the world a large or moderate amount over the next 50 years, while only 39% of the same respondents said they believed climate change would impact them, personally, a large or moderate amount over the same period.

There’s a lot of other interesting data in those survey results, especially in terms of who believes what about their own behaviors, and who will be impacted as a consequence of climate change in the coming decades.

But that tendency to assume that things will be worse elsewhere than at home, in one’s own backyard, may be the result of what’s sometimes called “Local Positivity Bias,” which we often see in crime statistics and reporting.

In essence, people tend to believe that crime on a national level is sky-high, going up up up, but those same people will report that local crime is actually not too bad. This is true even when crime across the board is going down, and it’s thought that this dissonance (which shows up in essentially every crime poll in modern history, and often shows up in polls on things like the economy, healthcare, and the quality of schools, too) might be the result of how we get different sorts of information and news.

In many cases, we get our local crime news from friends, neighbors, and local news outlets, while our sense of what crime looks like in other parts of the country is filtered through the biases and incentives of mass and social media, which is more likely to favor hyperbole and “if it bleeds, it leads”-style coverage (at least compared to those local alternatives).

There’s a chance this same bias is informing our thoughts and assumptions about climate change, too, and possibly a large number of other local-, national-, and global-scale issues, as well.