Social mindfulness predicts concern for nature and immigrants across 36 nations

People cooperate every day in ways that range from largescale contributions that mitigate climate change to simple actions such as leaving another individual with choice – known as social mindfulness. It is not yet clear whether and how these complex and more simple forms of cooperation relate. Prior work has found that countries with individuals who made more socially mindful choices were linked to a higher country environmental performance – a proxy for complex cooperation. Here we replicated this initial finding in 41 samples around the world, demonstrating the robustness of the association between social mindfulness and environmental performance, and substantially built on it to show this relationship extended to a wide range of complex cooperative indices, tied closely to many current societal issues. We found that greater social mindfulness expressed by an individual was related to living in countries with more social capital, more community participation and reduced prejudice towards immigrants. Our findings speak to the symbiotic relationship between simple and more complex forms of cooperation in societies

Moral expansiveness around the world:The role of societal factors across 36 countries

International audienceWhat are the things that we think matter morally, and how do societal factors influence this? To date, research has explored several individual-level and historical factors that influence the size of our ‘moral circles.' There has, however, been less attention focused on which societal factors play a role. We present the first multi-national exploration of moral expansiveness—that is, the size of people’s moral circles across countries. We found low generalized trust, greater perceptions of a breakdown in the social fabric of society, and greater perceived economic inequality were associated with smaller moral circles. Generalized trust also helped explain the effects of perceived inequality on lower levels of moral inclusiveness. Other inequality indicators (i.e., Gini coefficients) were, however, unrelated to moral expansiveness. These findings suggest that societal factors, especially those associated with generalized trust, may influence the size of our moral circles

Disseminating research findings: what should researchers do? A systematic scoping review of conceptual frameworks

Background: Addressing deficiencies in the dissemination and transfer of research-based knowledge into routine clinical practice is high on the policy agenda both in the UK and internationally. However, there is lack of clarity between funding agencies as to what represents dissemination. Moreover, the expectations and guidance provided to researchers vary from one agency to another. Against this background, we performed a systematic scoping to identify and describe any conceptual/organising frameworks that could be used by researchers to guide their dissemination activity.Methods: We searched twelve electronic databases (including MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, and PsycINFO), the reference lists of included studies and of individual funding agency websites to identify potential studies for inclusion. To be included, papers had to present an explicit framework or plan either designed for use by researchers or that could be used to guide dissemination activity. Papers which mentioned dissemination (but did not provide any detail) in the context of a wider knowledge translation framework, were excluded. References were screened independently by at least two reviewers; disagreements were resolved by discussion. For each included paper, the source, the date of publication, a description of the main elements of the framework, and whether there was any implicit/explicit reference to theory were extracted. A narrative synthesis was undertaken.Results: Thirty-three frameworks met our inclusion criteria, 20 of which were designed to be used by researchers to guide their dissemination activities. Twenty-eight included frameworks were underpinned at least in part by one or more of three different theoretical approaches, namely persuasive communication, diffusion of innovations theory, and social marketing.Conclusions: There are currently a number of theoretically-informed frameworks available to researchers that can be used to help guide their dissemination planning and activity. Given the current emphasis on enhancing the uptake of knowledge about the effects of interventions into routine practice, funders could consider encouraging researchers to adopt a theoretically-informed approach to their research dissemination

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.</p