How concerning is Lucifer? Insights from an experimental study of public responses to heat event naming in England and Italy

In 2023 areas in southern Europe experienced record-breaking high temperatures. With these events being dubbed Cerberus and Charon, debate has arisen in both the forecasting community and the media as to a) whether severe heat events should be officially named by meteorological services; and b) whether threatening/mythological names should be used. This study was undertaken as a step towards addressing the lack of empirical evidence on whether heat event naming affects public responses to heat protection messaging, and whether the nature of the name (mythological vs non-mythological) matters. We undertook online experiments with regionally representative samples in England (n=2152), where official storm naming exists but heat events are not currently named, and Italy (n=1984), where weather events are not officially named but where there is a tradition of unofficially naming anticyclones after figures from mythology or classical history. Participants were recruited through the market research company Cint and randomly allocated to view a hypothetical heat warning that referred to a forecast for an unnamed event (‘a heatwave’), a mythologically named event (UK=Heatwave Lucifer, Italy=A heatwave caused by anticyclone Lucifero) or a non-mythologically named event (UK=Heatwave Arnold, Italy=A heatwave caused by anticyclone Arnold).  Participants were asked to rate how severe they would anticipate the event to be, how concerning it would be, how much they would trust the message and their anticipated behavioural response. Multivariate Analysis of Variance tests indicated that English participants in the mythological name condition reported slightly greater anticipated severity and concern than in the no-name condition. However, while statistically significant the size of this effect was very small, accounting for less than 1% of variance in concern, with factors such as perceptions of the pleasantness of hot weather and concern about heat events increasing in the future having a much stronger effect. Amongst the Italian sample no statistically significant differences were found between those in the unnamed and mythologically named event conditions. However, the mythologically named event elicited slightly greater perceived severity, concern and trust than the non-mythologically named event. As with the English sample, size of the effect was, while statistically significant, very small. No effect on behavioural intention was found in either of the countries. Together, our findings suggests that naming in isolation only has a very small effect on anticipated response to heat messaging, and that the nature of this effect is dependent on cultural context.