Integrating Utopian Constructs: A Preliminary Investigation of Their Similarities and Predictive Power on Social Change Intentions

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to review this article.
It is well written and articulates very well the three main constructs that have been developed recently in relation to utopia, showing that these constructs relate to distinct but interrelated dimensions when it comes to collective positive prospection.

I have several minor points and one major point.

My minor points are as follows.

First, for the sake of clarity, I think it is important to be more specific about the conceptual and methodological differences between the scales.
For example, Wright et al. (2020) do not position their article in relation to the literature on utopia. Their concept is relevant to utopia but I am not convinced it could be characterized as a "utopian construct," as your article title suggests. Actually, there are two (brief) mentions of utopia in their article, and it is about a different paper by Fernando et al. (2019) on people who are asked to imagine a "green utopia".
Regarding Fernando et al. (2018), it would be worthwhile to point out that, in contrast to Basso & Krpan (2022) and Wright et al. (2020), it does not follow the necessary steps for scale development. For example, there is no CFA in Fernando et al. (2018).
Second, I miss a mention of measures such as the "need for chaos" (Petersen et al., 2023), which could be related to anti-utopianism (Petersen, M. B., Osmundsen, M., & Arceneaux, K. (2023). The "need for chaos" and motivations to share hostile political rumors. American Political Science Review, 117(4), 1486-1505).
Finally, on the utopian side, I miss a mention of the relationship between utopia and the concept of degrowth, which is about envisioning an alternative sustainable society and is not mentioned at all despite its utopian dimensions and its relevance to engagement in sustainable transition. Two papers, Basso & Krpan (2022) and Krpan and Basso (2021, Suppl. mat.), have already explored these links, but they deserve to be explored further as degrowth remains under-investigated in the literature in psychology (Krpan, D., & Basso, F. (2021). Keeping Degrowth or Going Rebirth? Regulatory focus theory and support for sustainable downscaling of production and consumption. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 74, 101586).

More importantly, and this is my major point, although the article does a good job of reporting results, I miss tests in terms of incremental predictive validity. The regression analyses are well executed, but it would be more helpful for readers to know which scale predicts which dependent variable above and beyond the other scales. This will make the conclusions of the article more constructive, as readers will know when one scale is more relevant than another to answer certain questions, and will use the most relevant scale in their studies.

I hope this helps, and I wish you the best with this interesting research project.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear authors,

First of all, I want to congratulate you on your research. The originality of your approach in the current context of climate change and warming is particularly relevant and deserves to be highlighted.

The statistical approach used, while providing interesting results, could benefit from further analysis. So given the preliminary nature of these analyses, I suggest that you indicate in the title of your article that this study is preliminary in order to more accurately reflect the current

scope of your work. This change would better position your work as a solid foundation for future research while recognizing its current limitations.

However, as you wisely pointed out in the discussion, there are some limitations to this study. In your analysis, you have wisely identified several collective and cultural limitations that influence the results of your study. However, it would be beneficial to broaden this reflection to include individual factors that can also have a significant impact on participants' perceptions and responses. In particular, I would encourage you to consider the influence of the age and generation of respondents. These factors can play a crucial role in how individuals perceive and interpret environmental changes. In this respect, the concept of environmental amnesia, developed by Peter H. Kahn, could shed some interesting light. This notion suggests that each generation tends to consider the state of the environment it experienced in its youth as the norm, thereby losing the memory of previous environmental conditions. Incorporating this concept into your analysis could reveal significant variations in the perceptions and attitudes of different generations to climate change and the propensity to imagine a future based on a different past. I therefore suggest that you consider adding a section to your discussion that addresses these individual aspects, in particular age and generation, and explores how the concept of environmental amnesia might apply to your research context.

Sincerely,

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I read this paper with great interest. The manuscript discussed three types of positive prospection, how they relate to each other and their relationships with social change behaviours. The paper was generally well-written, considered a timely topic and summarised findings well. However, there are a few weaknesses that should be addressed.

 

Firstly, the gap in current knowledge and the contribution that this research addresses is lacking in some depth and critical analysis. I agree that it is interesting that there are similar concepts being used and we don’t know how they relate or how they may impact behaviours differently. However, the real contribution of just looking at them all together feels somewhat lacking. Perhaps you could further explain how looking at them together in the future could be beneficial or if these results indicate that a scale that encompasses them all would be more beneficial for future research etc. Expanding upon the explanation and the scholarly contribution will go a long way in making this paper much stronger, impactful and useful for future research.

Additionally, I wonder whether utilising a structural equation path model would be a more parsimonious way of testing the relationships between the positive prospection aspects and the behavioural outcomes. That is, and SEM approach would provide a more comprehensive view of the relationships, it may reduce the risk of inflated type 1 errors and can also account for variance and error better (if power allows).

There are a few other smaller points that I would like to see improved, as listed below.

1)    There was some awkward phrasing that made certain parts of the manuscript more difficult to read. For example, line 36, parts of 53 and line 90 – I had to read these parts several times to understand the meaning.

2)    In the introduction paragraph about utopian thinking, I think it would be good to explain the concept a bit more and the effects it can have aside from just behaviour (e.g., criticism of society/reality, can lead to escapism, citizenship etc.). This also ties with some of the original utopian thinking work by Levitas (1990), as well as Kashima and Fernando (2020). I think including some more details in this paragraph will help explain utopian thinking better and help nuance some of the argument.

3)    On line 72, is this a direct quote from somewhere? If so, please cite appropriately, if not perhaps make it clearer that it is not a quote.

4)    On line 96 you refer to ‘several studies’ but it is not clear which studies you are referring to, are they just ones by Basso and Krpan? Please clarify.

5)    In Table 1, please indicate the p-values in someway (even if it is a note under the table saying all values meet a certain level of significance).

6)    The section on the CFA was done very well. I like that you used this method, analysed the collinearity and the outliers, I appreciated the thoroughness of this section. Where you present the model fit indices, I think it would be good to provide the benchmarks so readers who are unfamiliar with these analyses will have a clearer idea of the results (e.g., CFI ≥ .95, a RMSEA ≤ .08 (Kline, 1998), and a SRMR <0.08 (Hu & Bentler, 1999).

7)    When explaining the regression results, I think it is unnecessary to present the regression weights twice (in text and in the tables), explaining them and having the values in the table would be sufficient.

8)    It would be good to analyse the political orientation variable you measured. Was it a balanced sample or liberal bias? Did this impact some of the findings?

Overall, I believe this is a well conducted study and that the manuscript is well structured. My main comment would be that the paper could be more impactful if the gap and contribution were emphasised more. Moreover, consider if the SEM approach may be more appropriate.

 

Kashima, Y., & Fernando, J. (2020). Utopia and ideology in cultural dynamics. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 34, 102-106

Levitas, R. (1990). Educated hope: Ernst Bloch on abstract and concrete utopia. Utopian Studies, 1(2), 13-26

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thanks for addressing my comments. This is a very worthwhile contribution.

I wish you the best with your research to come on this project.

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for addressing the revisions so thoroughly. I believe the manuscript is much improved and is a valuable piece of scholarship. 

I have no further revisions.