Addressing climate change with behavioral science: A global intervention tournament in 63 countries
Research output: Journal contributions › Journal articles › Research › peer-review
Authors
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.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | eadj5778 |
| Journal | Science Advances |
| Volume | 10 |
| Issue number | 6 |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| ISSN | 2375-2548 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 09.02.2024 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:
Funding: this work was supported by Google Jigsaw grant (to M.Vl., K.c.d., and J.J.V.B.), Swiss national Science Foundation P400PS_190997 (to K.c.d.), dutch Research council grant 7934 (to K.l.v.d.B.), european Union grant no. id 776608 (to K.l.v.d.B.), John templeton Foundation grant 61378 (to M.A.), the national council for Scientific and technological development grant (to A.A.), christ church college Research centre grant (to M.A.J.A.), david Phillips Fellowship grant BB/R010668/2 (to M.A.J.A.), Jacobs Foundation Fellowship (to M.A.J.A.), dFG grant project no. 390683824 (to M.A.d., P.Ba., and B.B.), nYUAd research funds (to J.J.B.), the Swiss Federal Office of energy through the energy, economy, and Society program grant number: Si/502093-01 (to S.Be.), the Belgian national Fund for Scientific Research (FRS-FnRS) PdR 0253.19 (to P.Be.), Fund for scientific development at the Faculty of Psychology at SWPS University in Warsaw (to O.Bi.), Radboud University Behavioral Science institute (to d.n.M.B.),
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