Commencement Program, June (1939)

https://red.mnstate.edu/commencement/1056/thumbnail.jp

Addressing climate change with behavioral science: A global intervention tournament in 63 countries

Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting behavioral task. Across 59,440 participants from 63 countries, the interventions' effectiveness was small, largely limited to nonclimate skeptics, and differed across outcomes: Beliefs were strengthened mostly by decreasing psychological distance (by 2.3%), policy support by writing a letter to a future-generation member (2.6%), information sharing by negative emotion induction (12.1%), and no intervention increased the more effortful behavior-several interventions even reduced tree planting. Last, the effects of each intervention differed depending on people's initial climate beliefs. These findings suggest that the impact of behavioral climate interventions varies across audiences and target behaviors

Addressing climate change with behavioral science:A global intervention tournament in 63 countries

Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting behavioral task. Across 59,440 participants from 63 countries, the interventions' effectiveness was small, largely limited to nonclimate skeptics, and differed across outcomes: Beliefs were strengthened mostly by decreasing psychological distance (by 2.3%), policy support by writing a letter to a future-generation member (2.6%), information sharing by negative emotion induction (12.1%), and no intervention increased the more effortful behavior-several interventions even reduced tree planting. Last, the effects of each intervention differed depending on people's initial climate beliefs. These findings suggest that the impact of behavioral climate interventions varies across audiences and target behaviors.</p

Addressing climate change with behavioral science: a global intervention tournament in 63 countries

Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting behavioral task. Across 59,440 participants from 63 countries, the interventions’ effectiveness was small, largely limited to nonclimate skeptics, and differed across outcomes: Beliefs were strengthened mostly by decreasing psychological distance (by 2.3%), policy support by writing a letter to a future-generation member (2.6%), information sharing by negative emotion induction (12.1%), and no intervention increased the more effortful behavior—several interventions even reduced tree planting. Last, the effects of each intervention differed depending on people’s initial climate beliefs. These findings suggest that the impact of behavioral climate interventions varies across audiences and target behaviors

Addressing climate change with behavioral science:A global intervention tournament in 63 countries

Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting behavioral task. Across 59,440 participants from 63 countries, the interventions' effectiveness was small, largely limited to nonclimate skeptics, and differed across outcomes: Beliefs were strengthened mostly by decreasing psychological distance (by 2.3%), policy support by writing a letter to a future-generation member (2.6%), information sharing by negative emotion induction (12.1%), and no intervention increased the more effortful behavior-several interventions even reduced tree planting. Last, the effects of each intervention differed depending on people's initial climate beliefs. These findings suggest that the impact of behavioral climate interventions varies across audiences and target behaviors.</p

Collective Behavior in a Connected World

Understanding how individual actions and interactions give rise to group-level properties is at the core of collective behavior research. In animal groups, measuring and modeling these processes has yielded predictive insight into how they avoid predators, navigate, cooperate, and make decisions. Often, they achieve these feats in the absence of leaders and without individuals being aware of the collective behavior itself. Remarkably, even in groups composed of unrelated, selfish members, natural selection has produced emergent and functional group behavior. Collective functionality however, can be sensitive to perturbation and specific to environmental contexts. For example, the simple rules that govern how army ants follow pheromone trails allow them to navigate and make decisions in dense jungle forests with poor vision. In some contexts, however, these rules can go awry resulting in a death spiral whereby the ants march in a circle until they starve or rejoin the group. The context-dependent functionality of collective behavior raises serious questions for human groups. The rules that govern our collective behavior arose in the context of hunter-gatherer groups, yet we now face global challenges while communicating in increasingly digital ways. This thesis begins by drawing on evidence across disciplines to argue that human collective behavior is unlikely to be sustainable in the absence of intervention. To this end, chapter one charts a course for a crisis-minded study of collective behavior, while highlighting some of the key challenges and critical next steps. In chapter two, this thesis reveal how network structures unique to the digital era impact the ability of groups to make accurate decisions in the face of uncertainty. Finally, chapter three examines a key hurdle to managing and understanding human behavior by providing evidence that social interaction and network topology pose challenges to conducting statistical inference

Collective wisdom in polarized groups

The potential for groups to outperform the cognitive capabilities of even highly skilled individuals, known as the “wisdom of the crowd”, is crucial to the functioning of democratic institutions. In recent years, increasing polarization has led to concern about its effects on the accuracy of electorates, juries, courts, and congress. While there is empirical evidence of collective wisdom in partisan crowds, a general theory has remained elusive. Central to the challenge is the difficulty of disentangling the effect of limited interaction between opposing groups (homophily) from their tendency to hold opposing viewpoints (partisanship). To overcome this challenge, we develop an agent-based model of collective wisdom parameterized by the experimentally-measured behaviour of participants across the political spectrum. In doing so, we reveal that differences across the political spectrum in how individuals express and respond to knowledge interact with the structure of the network to either promote or undermine wisdom. We verify these findings experimentally and construct a more general theoretical framework. Finally, we provide evidence that incidental, context-specific differences across the political spectrum likely determine the impact of polarization. Overall, our results show that whether polarized groups benefit from collective wisdom is generally predictable but highly context-specific.publishe