Featured faculty: Hong Ying-yi
Written by Pan Jingyi

Each year, scientists issue warnings about breaking temperature records, and regrettably, this troubling trend continues. The latest World Meteorological Organisation State of the Climate Update indicates that 2024 is on track to be the warmest year, with a global mean surface temperature of 1.54 °C above pre-industrial levels during the first nine months.

From the severe drought in central China during the summer of 2024 to Spain’s devastating floods in October of the same year, people around the world are grappling with increasingly frequent extreme climate events. However, a 2023 report by French energy company EDF reveals that 36 per cent of the global population continues to question the human origins of climate change.

“As extreme weather events become more prevalent, our findings indicate that climate change sceptics would shift their beliefs after experiencing these events by themselves.”

Professor Hong Ying-yi

Experiencing anomalous weather conditions first-hand may influence people’s perceptions of climate change, but what about those who believe in climate change conspiracy theories? Will they still trust the conspiracy after experiencing the direct effect of global warming? How does scepticism surrounding climate change impact businesses? And what can companies do to foster scientific literacy on this critical issue?

“As extreme weather events become more prevalent, our findings indicate that climate change sceptics would shift their beliefs after experiencing these events by themselves,” says Hong Ying-yi, Choh-Ming Li Professor of Management at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) Business School.

In a study titled Hotter weather, less of a hoax? Testing the longitudinal association between experience of temperature anomalies and belief in climate change conspiracy theories, Professor Hong and her collaborators investigate the links between the experience of unusual temperatures and climate change conspiracy beliefs.

The findings could have implications for businesses in sectors sensitive to climate conditions. A report titled Investing in the green economy 2024 by the London Stock Exchange Group unveils that the green economy has been second only to the technology sector in growth and financial performance in the past decade, generating a total annual revenue of almost US$5 trillion in 2023. Understanding public perceptions of climate change would be useful for businesses to develop strategies in communication, marketing, and sustainability practices.

“Companies that care about sustainability would grow their brand equity in the long run,” she adds. “Businesses that ‘walk the talk’ can convince their stakeholders to understand the importance of sustainability and mitigate potential risks associated with climate change scepticism.”

Hotter weather, fewer conspiracy beliefs?

Working together with Chan Hoi-Wing of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Wang Xue of Beijing Normal University, Tam Kim-Pong of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Huang Bo of the University of Hong Kong, Professor Hong conducted two studies in the US and China.

The team recruited around 1,000 adults from each country to complete online surveys. The results indicated that individuals who perceived unusual summer temperatures were less likely to believe in climate change conspiracy theories in both countries. In the US, the effects lasted even four months later.

Why do experiences of unusual temperatures affect people’s climate change beliefs? Professor Hong and her collaborators identified two possible reasons. The first one is the perceived psychological distance, referring to how individuals perceive the relevance of climate change—whether it will affect their local area, people in other countries, or future generations.

As the psychological distance diminishes, individuals are more inclined to view climate change as an imminent and pressing threat. “The experience of hotter local temperatures would lead to less perceived psychological distance of climate change and, in turn, attenuate climate change conspiracy beliefs,” Professor Hong concludes.

Secondly, the team found that experiencing hotter temperatures also triggered stronger negative emotions toward climate change, leading to fewer conspiracy beliefs. “Negative emotions may make people more vigilant of potential threats and, therefore, would be more likely to reject the hoax conspiracy narratives,” Professor Hong explains.

However, unlike the subjective experience above, the researchers observed a mixed picture regarding objective temperature anomalies. Objective temperature anomalies refer to the actual measured anomalies or deviations from a long-term average temperature for a specific location and time period.

They found that objective summer temperature anomalies were associated with higher climate change conspiracy beliefs in some contexts. In the American sample, a hotter summer was linked to increased conspiracy beliefs, contradicting the initial finding. This suggests that personal experiences and perceptions matter the most in shaping conspiracy beliefs.

Strong conspiracy mentality can be changed

Extreme weather events often prompt individuals to seek out more information about climate change, and more exposure through discussion and other means of communication could promote climate change concerns and beliefs. The researchers found that climate change information exposure was linked to lower conspiracy beliefs in the long term, though the effects were less noticeable in the short term. “The beneficial effect of climate change discussion, information seeking, and information exposure on reducing scepticism may take time to emerge,” Professor Hong says.

The study also highlights the role of personal experience in shaping opinions. While individuals with stronger conspiracy mentalities are more likely to hold climate change conspiracy beliefs, their attitudes could still shift based on personal experiences and increased exposure to relevant information.

“The increased information exposure may help people with a conspiracy mentality to develop a better scientific understanding of climate change, as exposure to non-hoax narratives and climate change discussion may contribute to enhancing the perceived scientific consensus on the issue,” says Professor Hong.

What businesses can do to address climate change scepticism?

The intensified challenges posed by climate change require various sectors, including businesses, to collaborate to tackle these pressing issues. Embracing sustainability not only nurtures healthy global ecosystems but also fosters the prosperity of businesses.

Nevertheless, scepticism about climate change remains a barrier. “Climate change sceptics will not be willing to engage in pro-environmental behaviours nor to support pro-environmental policies and regulations,” Professor Hong says. “This can undermine the sustainability effort by government and businesses.”

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The current research highlights the potential for shifting climate change conspiracy, suggesting that occurrences of temperature anomalies could be a crucial opportunity to promote scientific understanding of this phenomenon. “Businesses can be ‘change’ agents on this matter. They can enhance their collaborations with scientific institutions and help to promote scientific understanding of climate change via their marketing and public relations activities,” Professor Hong says.

In conclusion, she emphasises that sustainability stands as one of the fundamental pillars of the human future. Therefore, companies that can harness its power are poised to flourish in the years to come.

The post How to sway the minds of climate change deniers first appeared on China Business Knowledge.

By Jaymee Ng, Principal Writer, China Business Knowledge@CUHK

Missing the Forest for the Trees

Her study “Missing the Forest for the Trees: Prior Entrepreneurial Experience, Role Identity, and Entrepreneurial Creativity” was co-conducted with Prof. Siran Zhan at the University of New South Wales College and Prof. Marilyn Ang Uy at Nanyang Technological University. Some existing research literature on entrepreneurship focus on the journey or personal qualities of successful entrepreneurs, while others studied the mindset and behaviours of these entrepreneurs. Prof. Hong and her co-authors combined the two factors and tackled the topic from a “person-by-situation” interaction approach.

This approach assumes entrepreneurs take on different roles, such as that of an inventor or businessperson, and these are triggered by different situations. For example, an entrepreneur would play the role of a salesman during a pitch meeting, but the same person would wear the inventor hat when dealing with product design in the lab. When the entrepreneur plays the role of a salesperson, their attention would be more focused on the profitability of the product and less on the product design, and vice versa. When too much attention is given to the tasks related to one role, entrepreneurs might overlook other equally important aspects, creating the so-called “missing the forest for the trees” effect.

“Experienced entrepreneurs tend to be capable of processing a greater amount of information in a given instance and see the big picture, which novices tend to neglect.”

Prof. Hong Ying-yi

“We expect experienced entrepreneurs to have developed a more holistic knowledge structure in which their inventor and businessperson roles are integrated. In contrast, novice entrepreneurs who lack prior entrepreneurial experience may see their two role identities as separate and disjointed,” Prof. Hong comments. “Thus, experienced entrepreneurs tend to be capable of processing a greater amount of information in a given instance and see the big picture, which novices tend to neglect.”

To test their theory, the researchers recruited 108 entrepreneurs who were in the process of starting a new venture to participate in an experiment. Among the participants, 40 were experienced entrepreneurs who had started businesses before. The participants were first asked to recall and write about their experience as an inventor or a businessperson. They were then told to submit ideas for a product or service to sell to university students. Their ideas were then evaluated in terms of how novel or commercially viable they were by experts with substantial experience in entrepreneurship.

The study found that entrepreneurs with less experience tend to produce fewer ideas that were deemed novel when asked to assume the role of a businessperson, whereas experienced entrepreneurs were able to maintain their ability to generate creative ideas even when they were in salesman mode. On the other hand, inexperienced entrepreneurs produced fewer ideas that were deemed by experts to be commercially viable when they assume the role of an inventor while experienced entrepreneurs did not display any reduction in performance.

The effect is even more pronounced when the entrepreneur is forced by circumstances to take up a specific role. For example, an entrepreneur under pressure to raise funds for their project must fulfil the role of a businessperson and put their inventor self aside. Prof. Hong says such a tension-ridden situation would likely to result in reducing creativity, especially among inexperienced entrepreneurs. The study results confirmed this conjecture, with the business ideas of experienced entrepreneurs being 12.7 percent more creative and 7.7 percent more profitable than inexperienced entrepreneurs when they were placed in that situation.

Interestingly, experienced entrepreneurs were 9.4 percent less innovative than inexperienced entrepreneurs when there was no tension between the two roles. The study explained that new entrepreneurs might be better at learning at being an inventor and thus were able to produce more innovative ideas. However, overall experienced entrepreneurs were able to perform more consistently regardless of the situation.

The post How Does Experience Matter for Entrepreneurs? first appeared on China Business Knowledge.

By Jaymee Ng, Principal Writer, China Business Knowledge@CUHK

Corruption is a major threat faced by China and anyone who wants to do business in the country. In recent years, the Chinese government’s crackdowns in corruption has led to some success.  In the Berlin-based non-profit Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index 2017, China ranked 77^th with a score of 41 out of 100, a slight improvement from the score of 36 in 2014. The index ranks 180 countries and territories by their perceived levels of public sector corruption according to experts and businesspeople with a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is highly corrupt and 100 is very clean.

While the government continues to combat corruption from the top level, it also needs the support of individuals. How do Chinese people perceive bribery acts? Are their perception any different from people of the Western culture? Prof. Hong Ying-yi, Choh-Ming Li Professor of Marketing at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) Business School has revealed some interesting answers in her research.

With her collaborators from other universities, her research entitled “Is individual bribery or organizational bribery more intolerable in China (versus in the United States)? Advancing theory on the perception of corrupt acts” takes a look into how two cultures (Chinese, American) perceive two types of bribery: individual and organizational.

Individual bribery is bribe-giving on behalf of an individual to serve individual interests (e.g., a parent bribing a teacher in order to get favourable treatment for his or her child); whereas organizational bribery is bribe-giving on behalf of an organization to serve the collective interests (e.g., a listed firm bribes the auditor to produce fraud financial reports or a company bribes the government for policy support).

According to Prof. Hong, the distinction between individual and organizational bribery is important. “Past research suggested that cultures vary in their construals of individuals and collectives as two separate, cognitively meaningful social entities,” says Prof. Hong.

“We expect that in cultures emphasizing the agency of collectives over individuals (e.g., China), organizational bribery might be seen as a more significant transgression than individual bribery, whereas in cultures emphasizing the agency of individuals over collectives (e.g., the United States), individual bribery might be seen as a more significant transgression than organizational bribery,” she adds.

The Study

The researchers conducted several studies with hundreds of college students and working adults in mainland China and the United States. The participants were presented with a list of nine individual (e.g., a person who breaks a traffic law gives money to the police officer) and nine organizational bribing behaviour descriptions (e.g., a company gives money in order to win a bidding war). They were then asked to describe their perceptions toward the bribing behaviours via questionnaires.

“We predicted that the Chinese participants would be more intolerant of organizational bribery than individual bribery because they tend to perceive organizational bribery as driven by internal desire, whereas individual bribery as driven by external norms (e.g., other parents are bribing the teacher too).  By contrast, we predicted that the American participants make the opposite attributions In other words, they would be more intolerant of individual bribery than organizational bribery because they tend to perceive individual bribery as driven by a person’s free choice, whereas organization bribery as driven by external business norms,” Prof. Hong says.

As predicted, the results showed that participants in both cultures found bribery intolerable. However, the Chinese participants were more intolerant of organizational bribery while the US participants were more intolerant of individual bribery.

To unravel the psychological mechanism underneath the difference in the cultural perceptions toward bribery, the researchers recruited a fresh batch of participants in mainland China and the U.S.

After reading some of the bribing behaviours in the previous study, the participants were asked to estimate the reasons for such behaviour. For example, an internal reason for bribery can be presented as “a person or a company does not have high moral standards” whereas “this is the social norm” is regarded as an external reason.

“Interestingly, Chinese participants made more internal attributions for organizational bribery than for individual bribery, whereas the results for the US participants were completely opposite,” she remarks.

Perception of Bribery Through Bicultural Lens

To further test the cultural effect on intolerance of individual versus organizational bribery, the researchers extended their study to Hong Kong where people are being influenced by a combination of East and West cultures.

Previous research has shown that Hongkongers are bicultural in a way that they grow up in a Chinese cultural milieu and are also exposed to Western culture through education and the media.

“Cultures are like open systems and individuals may have access to more than one system; when and how the cultural system influences one’s judgment depends on factors such as contextual cues and identities,” Prof. Hong explains.

To measure bicultural identity, the team adopted the Bicultural Identity Integration (BII), which is the degree to which people experience their two cultural identities as close and compatible or distant and conflicting.

“Hong Kong people who are high in BII view their Eastern and Western identities as close and compatible, whereas those who are low in BII view their two cultural identities as distant and conflicting,” she explains.  “As such, people with high BII can easily switch between the Eastern and Western culture in different situations, but those with low BII will resist the switching and react against the situation,” she adds.

Through conducting several surveys among 117 bicultural Hong Kong Chinese undergraduate students, the researchers predicted that those with high BII would show more intolerance towards organizational bribery when they are reminded of the Chinese culture and more intolerance towards individual bribery when primed with the American culture. That is, they will assimilate their judgment in accordance with the primed culture. By contrast, those with low BII are expected to behave in the opposite way.

Once again, the results confirmed the researchers’ hypotheses.

“In China, policies and measures may be necessary to regulate the acts of bribery at the individual level, especially those that involve close relational others, as a first step toward preventing more damaging forms of bribery from exerting influence.”

Prof. Hong Ying-yi

The ‘Slippery Slope’ Effect

According to Prof. Hong, one possible reason of Chinese people being more intolerant of organizational bribery because lay persons perceive more agency or ‘power’ in organizations than in individuals. That is, organizations often shape individuals’ outcomes, but individuals are relatively ’powerless’ in altering the paths of organizations.  This also explains why organizational misconducts often evoke strong public outrages in China (e.g., the infant milk formula scandal).

Although Chinese people are more intolerant of organizational bribery than individual bribery, large-scale corruptions often start from an individual level that typically escalates from personal favours into policy favours. Therefore, Prof. Hong says this ‘slippery slope’ effect should be closely monitored to prevent more damaging forms of bribery.

“In China, policies and measures may be necessary to regulate the acts of bribery at the individual level, especially those that involve close relational others (e.g., family members of politicians), as a first step toward preventing more damaging forms of bribery from exerting influence,” she says.

“In recent years, some of the anti-corruption policies and measures in China have begun targeting individuals, such as the launching of more explicit stipulations on specific behaviours by government officials and businessmen,” she concludes.

The post Perception of Corrupt Acts: East vs. West first appeared on China Business Knowledge.