• Energy Research

With mandates and taxes to mitigate climate change proving politically challenging to implement, some scholars and policy makers have started looking to social norms as a vehicle for large-scale behavioral change. This raises the question of whether formal institutions or organizations are able to influence social norms and behavior. We designed a randomized experiment with a sample of 3627 American residents to investigate how social norm perceptions and behaviors change in response to institutional signals about climate change, and how this varies with signal source. We found that institutional signals, in particular when originating from science or business actors, shifted perceptions of descriptive social norms about climate action. Institutional signals also influenced intended pro-environmental behaviors, but did not increase personal contributions to environmental causes, suggesting that a shift in perceived norms may be insufficient to drive personal action, especially when it involves personal costs. Our study not only emphasizes the importance of institutional signals and messengers in changing perceptions of social norms, but also highlights the complexities involved in norm interventions ultimately aimed at influencing behavior.

Pilot study of the belief trap measurement paradigm using a Clickworker sample of German and Austrian entrepreneurs

Pilot study of the belief trap measurement paradigm using a Prolific sample of US entrepreneurs

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.

The COVID-19 pandemic in the United States was characterized by a partisan gap. Democrats were more concerned about this novel health threat, more willing to socially distance, and more likely to support policies aimed at mitigating the spread of the virus than Republicans. In cross-sectional analyses of three nationally representative survey waves in 2020, we find that adverse experience with COVID-19 is associated with a narrowing of the partisan gap. The mean difference between Republicans and Democrats in concern, policy support, and behavioral intentions narrows or even disappears at high levels of self-reported adverse experience. Reported experience does not depend on party affiliation and is predicted by local COVID-19 incidence rates. In contrast, analyses of longitudinal data and county-level incidence rates do not show a consistent relationship among experience, partisanship, and behavior or policy support. Our findings suggest that self-reported personal experience interacts with partisanship in complex ways and may be an important channel for concern about novel threats such as the COVID-19 pandemic. We find consistent results for self-reported experience of extreme weather events and climate change attitudes and policy preferences, although the association between extreme weather and experience and climate change is more tenuous.

Our goal is to investigate whether and when spillover occurs between behaviors and policy support in the “problem contexts” of climate change and COVID-19, both within the same problem context and between them. Additionally, we explore three “problem response types” within each problem context: mitigation responses, adaptation responses, and engagement responses. We also refer to behaviors and policy support as two types of “problem response spheres”.