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

2024/02/07 by Madalina Vlasceanu, Kimberly C Doell, Joseph B. Bak-Coleman +97 · 2 voices · 15 citations
Environmental Science · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Behavioral Health and Interventions #Climate Change Communication and Perception #Environmental Education and Sustainability

paper · pdf · doi:10.1126/sciadv.adj5778

openalex publication_date 2024/02/07 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31

Abstract

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.

Citations

• Quantifying the potential for climate change mitigation of consumption options
• Greater than 99% consensus on human caused climate change in the peer-reviewed scientific literature
• Crowdsourcing research questions in science
• The i-frame and the s-frame: How focusing on individual-level solutions has led behavioral public policy astray
• To select effective interventions for pro-environmental behaviour change, we need to consider determinants of behaviour

Cited by

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• Responsibility to future generations: A strategy for combatting climate change across political divides
• Truth discernment may not help to overcome misinformation
• Insights from climate psychology for misinformation research
• United Nations Environment Assembly attendees underestimate public willingness to contribute to climate action

Discussions

• Link to the study: doi.org/10.1126/scia... (End of 🧵) #postdog @aarhusuni.bsky.social [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
• ...capture more critical climate scenarios, they do not necessarily reflect the dilemma faced by individuals in our society (yet...Gulp!). Our results resonate with recent findings reported by Vlascea [bsky, 0 points, 1 comments]

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• Psychological interventions that decrease psychological distance or challenge system justification increase motivation to exert effort to mitigate climate change
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