The Gateway Belief Model (GBM): A review and research agenda for communicating the scientific consensus on climate change

Empirical research on the Gateway Belief Model (GBM) has flourished in recent years. The model offers a dual-process account of how attitude change happens in response to normative cues about scientific agreement. A plethora of correlational and experimental evidence has emerged documenting the positive direct and indirect effects of communicating the scientific consensus on global warming. I review recent scholarship and argue that the next generation of research on the GBM should focus on better justifying the inclusion of moderators on both a theoretical and empirical level, explicitly manipulate motivations to process the consensus message, model how consensus cues operate in competitive information networks and test the model in field settings using causal chain experiments.