Core social motives explain responses to collective action issues

Managing collective action issues such as pandemics and climate change requires major social and behavioral change. Dominant approaches to addressing these issues center around information provision and financial incentives to shift behavior, yet, these approaches are rarely effective without integrating insights from psychological research on motivation. By accurately characterizing human motives, social scientists can identify when and why individuals engage, and facilitate behavior change and public engagement. Here, we use the core social motives model to sort social psychological theories into five fundamental social motives: to Belong, Understand, Control, self-Enhance, and Trust. We explain how each motive can improve or worsen collective action issues, and how this framework can be further developed towards a comprehensive social psychological perspective to collective action issues.</p

Medical applications of nasa-developed science and technology quarterly progress report no. 2, 30 apr. - 31 jul. 1965

Medical applications of aerospace science and technolog

Personality trait effects on green household installations

Large, one-time investments in green energy installations effectively reduce domestic energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. Despite long-term economic benefits for households, the rate of green investments often remains moderate unless supported by financial subsidies. Beyond financial considerations, green investments may also be driven by individual psychological factors. The current study uses data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (N = 3,468) to analyse whether the household decision to invest in green energy installations is linked to the Big Five personality traits. Personality traits and domestic investments in solar and other alternative energy systems had weak indirect associations through environmental concern but not through risk preferences. Openness to Experience and Neuroticism showed a weak positive relationship with green energy installations through the environmental concern channel, whereas Extraversion had a weak negative link. Based on these findings, persuasive messaging for green investments may be more effective when it focuses on environmental concern rather than reduced risk in countries like Germany, where long-standing financial subsidies decreased the risk in green investments.</jats:p

Climate Concern and Engagement: Large Face-to-Face and Online Polls by the Dutch non-profit Milieudefensie

Climate change mitigation depends on tracking public opinion across populations. Social scientists can collaborate with environmental organizations that conduct surveys among their audiences. We teamed up with the non-profit Milieudefensie, who surveyed Dutch attitudes towards climate change in 2019-2020. The large dataset had face-to-face (n = 3,102) and online interviews (n = 30,311) of urbanity, climate concern, policy preferences, interviewer-rated engagement with climate change, and behavior (whether the interviewee provided their email and phone number to the organization). To reveal the representativeness of these kinds of convenience samples, we tested whether attitudes and their associations with behaviors were similar to previous studies. Climate concern, preference for climate policy, and interviewer-rated engagement were high. In the online survey, 47% of respondents signed up for an email newsletter, and 7% provided their phone number. Higher climate concern and preference for climate policy predicted interviewer-rated engagement and behavior (weak to strong associations). Urbanity was not related to concern, policy preferences, or interviewer-rated engagement. Policy preferences did not differ between the face-to-face and online samples. The results provide convergent evidence to conventional online surveys. These Dutch residents appear slightly more engaged with systemic change to mitigate climate change than the general public.</p