The effect of advocacy on perceived credibility of climate scientists in a Dutch text on greening of gardens

van Sebille, Erik; Weel, Celine; Vliegenthart, Rens; Bos, Mark

doi:10.5194/gc-9-69-2026

Articles | Volume 9, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/gc-9-69-2026

© Author(s) 2026. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/gc-9-69-2026

© Author(s) 2026. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 9, issue 1

Research article

|

12 Jan 2026

Research article |

| 12 Jan 2026

The effect of advocacy on perceived credibility of climate scientists in a Dutch text on greening of gardens

Erik van Sebille, Celine Weel, Rens Vliegenthart, and Mark Bos

Data sets

erikvansebille/ActivismCredibilityArticle: First release of Activism Credibility Article (v0.1.0) Erik van Sebille https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15755647

Model code and software

erikvansebille/ActivismCredibilityArticle: First release of Activism Credibility Article (v0.1.0) Erik van Sebille https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15755647

plot-likert nmalkin https://github.com/nmalkin/ 110 plot-likert/

Short summary

Many climate scientists intuitively fear their credibility decreases when they engage in advocacy. We find that the opposite is the case. By surveying almost 1000 Dutch adults, we found that the credibility of a fictional climate scientists who wrote an article about the greening of gardens was higher when that text included advocacy statements, compared to when it was neutral. This is because personalization increases the goodwill of readers for the academic who writes a text.