TY - JOUR
T1 - Addressing climate change with behavioral science
T2 - A global intervention tournament in 63 countries
AU - Vlasceanu, Madalina
AU - Doell, Kimberly C
AU - Bak-Coleman, Joseph B
AU - Todorova, Boryana
AU - Berkebile-Weinberg, Michael M
AU - Grayson, Samantha J
AU - Patel, Yash
AU - Goldwert, Danielle
AU - Pei, Yifei
AU - Chakroff, Alek
AU - Pronizius, Ekaterina
AU - van den Broek, Karlijn L
AU - Vlasceanu, Denisa
AU - Constantino, Sara
AU - Morais, Michael J
AU - Schumann, Philipp
AU - Rathje, Steve
AU - Fang, Ke
AU - Aglioti, Salvatore Maria
AU - Alfano, Mark
AU - Alvarado-Yepez, Andy J
AU - Andersen, Angélica
AU - Anseel, Frederik
AU - Apps, Matthew A J
AU - Asadli, Chillar
AU - Awuor, Fonda Jane
AU - Azevedo, Flavio
AU - Basaglia, Piero
AU - Bélanger, Jocelyn J
AU - Berger, Sebastian
AU - Bertin, Paul
AU - Bialek, Michal
AU - Bialobrzeska, Olga
AU - Blaya-Burgo, Michelle
AU - Bleize, Daniëlle N M
AU - Bø, Simen
AU - Boecker, Lea
AU - Boggio, Paulo S
AU - Borau, Sylvie
AU - Bos, Björn
AU - Bouguettaya, Ayoub
AU - Brauer, Markus
AU - Brick, Cameron
AU - Brik, Tymofii
AU - Briker, Roman
AU - Brosch, Tobias
AU - Buchel, Ondrej
AU - Buonauro, Daniel
AU - Butalia, Radhika
AU - Carvacho, Héctor
AU - Et al.
N1 - Data and materials availability: The data can be downloaded from https://zenodo.org/records/10345806. All data and code can also be found on GitHub (https://github.com/josephbb/ManyLabsClimate and https://github.com/mvlasceanu/ClimateTournament). The interventions (in each language) can be accessed as qsf files (to be imported in Qualtrics): https://osf.io/ytf89/files/osfstorage/6454f8d771778511d9b0f48f. A web tool for rapidly assessing which intervention is most likely to be effective at increasing climate change beliefs, policy support, information sharing, and tree-planting efforts, for any subsample target of interest, varying along demographics such as nationality, political ideology, age, gender, education, or income level can be found at https://climate-interventions.shinyapps.io/climate-interventions/. All other data needed to evaluate the conclusions in this paper are present in the paper and/or the Supplementary Materials.
PY - 2024/2/7
Y1 - 2024/2/7
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Humans
KW - Climate Change
KW - Intention
KW - Policy
KW - Behavioral Sciences
U2 - 10.1126/sciadv.adj5778
DO - 10.1126/sciadv.adj5778
M3 - Article
SN - 2375-2548
VL - 10
JO - Science advances
JF - Science advances
IS - 6
M1 - eadj5778
ER -