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

Doing it Together: Testing the Impersonal Impact Hypothesis in the Public Health Domain

The impersonal impact hypothesis states that news consumption leads to an increase of social concern, but not to an increase of personal concern, whereas the latter is most important for stimulating behaviour change. However, previous findings are mixed and mostly investigate private health behaviour. Here we, therefore, conceptually replicate these findings by studying a public health crisis: the case of the Covid-19 pandemic. The results of our longitudinal, five-wave study do not show support for the impersonal impact hypothesis, but rather seem to reveal the possibility of a personal impact hypothesis. That is, our findings show that news consumption increased participants’ personal concerns and to a lesser extent their societal concerns. News consumption furthermore indirectly affected adherence to governmental policy measures via these concerns. Additionally, participants adhered more to these measures when they believed they can make an incremental difference in stopping Covid-19 by adhering to Covid-19 policies (i.e., direct effect of participative beliefs). The belief of “doing it together” seems thus vital for policy adherence. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed

Learning from the COVID-19 pandemic to combat climate change: Comparing motivations driving individual action in global crises

Can we learn from our dealings with COVID-19 to stop climate change? COVID-19 has changed our world in a short time. The speed at which people have adapted to stop the spread of COVID-19 is impressive. Individuals, organizations, and governments have shown willingness to change their behavior to a great extent. This contrasts with the speed and motivation of individuals to adjust their behavior when it comes to another important global issues: climate change. Why this difference? The COVID-19 crisis and the climate crisis are of course different in nature. Still, we can learn from the COVID-19 crisis and find ways to deal with the climate crisis. This project studies the motivations of people to adhere to the COVID-19 guidelines and change their behavior. These insights will be compared to people's reasons for adapting their behavior when it comes to climate change to learn more about the differences and similarities. This knowledge can be used at a later stage to find ways to encourage people to behave in a more climate-friendly way

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

International audienceEffectively 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