Climate Cognition Lab
What are the cognitive, social, and behavioral processes underlying climate solutions?
The Climate Cognition Lab is a psychology research lab at Stanford University Doerr School of Sustainability led by Prof. Madalina Vlasceanu. We are interested in the cognitive, social, political, and behavioral mechanisms underlying belief and behavioral change processes in individuals and collectives. Our work focuses on designing, testing, and implementing interventions aimed at stimulating social change and improving societal welfare. Guided by a theoretical framework of investigation and striving to achieve ecological validity, we employ a large array of methods including behavioral laboratory experiments, field studies, randomized controlled trials, international many-lab collaborations, agent based modeling, and social network analysis. Our lab is situated at the intersection of basic and applied science, incorporates an interdisciplinary perspective, and directly informs policy relevant to current societal issues, such as the climate crisis.
Book
Research
Which behavioral interventions motivate public, political, and financial climate advocacy?
Addressing climate change depends on large-scale system changes, which require public advocacy. Here, we identified and tested 17 expert-crowdsourced theory-informed behavioral interventions designed to promote public, political, and financial advocacy in a large quota-matched sample of US residents (n = 31,324). The most consistently effective intervention emphasized both the collective efficacy and emotional benefits of climate action, increasing advocacy by up to 10 percentage points. This was also the top intervention among participants identifying as Democrats. Appealing to binding moral foundations, such as purity and sanctity, was also among the most effective interventions, showing positive effects even among participants identifying as Republicans. These findings provide critical insights to policymakers and practitioners aiming to galvanize the public behind collective action and advocacy on climate change with affordable and scalable interventions.
Does increasing climate literacy lead to the adoption of more impactful climate actions?
Reducing lifestyle carbon emissions is a critical component of decarbonizing society. However, people hold substantial misperceptions about the relative efficacy of different behavioral changes, such as comprehensively recycling or avoiding long flights, and these misperceptions may lead to the suboptimal allocation of resources. In a preregistered experiment in the United States, we tested the effects of two literacy interventions on correcting misperceptions and increasing commitments toward more effective individual-level climate actions. Participants were randomly assigned to experimental conditions in which they received information about the relative mitigation potential of climate behaviors; and to a no-information control. The interventions led to more accurate efficacy perceptions and increased commitments to engage in higher-impact individual-level actions relative to the Control group. However, we also found evidence for a negative spillover effect, participants in the literacy conditions decreasing their commitments to collective climate actions such as voting or marching, suggesting an unintended consequence of interventions focusing solely on lifestyle behaviors.
What is the most effective behavioral intervention at increasing climate beliefs and policy support around the world?
Effectively reducing climate change requires dramatic, global behavior change. Yet 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 non-climate-skeptics, and differed across outcomes: Beliefs were strengthened most 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. Finally, 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.
How do Internet Search engines portray climate change, and does that influence policy support?
Despite the ubiquitous role Internet search engines have in information acquisition, little is known about how such algorithms portray climate change to different communities, and how these portrayals impact climate sentiment. In a sample of 47 countries, we found that preexisting nationwide climate change concern predicts the emotionality and action elicitation of climate change Google Image Search outputs. In a follow-up experiment we found that showing users images displayed in high preexisting concern nations (e.g., Venezuela) increases their climate policy support more than showing them images displayed in low preexisting concern nations (e.g., Estonia), suggesting a cycle of climate sentiment propagation facilitated by Internet Search algorithms.
What is the impact of climate interventions along the political ideological spectrum?
A major barrier to climate change mitigation is the political polarization of climate change beliefs. In a global experiment conducted in 60 countries (N = 51,224), we assess the differential impact of eleven climate interventions across the ideological divide. At baseline, we find political polarization of climate change beliefs and policy support globally, with people who reported being liberal believing and supporting climate policy more than those who reported being conservative. However, we find no evidence for a statistically significant difference between these groups in their engagement in a behavioral tree planting task. This conceptual-behavioral polarization incongruence results from self-identified conservatives acting despite not believing, rather than self-identified liberals not acting on their beliefs. We also find three interventions boost climate beliefs and policy support across the ideological spectrum, and one intervention stimulates the climate action of people identifying as liberal. None of the interventions tested show evidence for a statistically significant boost in climate action for self-identified conservatives.
Who are key actors in the sociopolitical climate system and what are the levers of influence in the system?
Climate change is often treated as a technological or environmental challenge, yet societal responses are shaped by the psychological and sociopolitical dynamics linking institutions, markets, and human behavior. Here we propose a multi-actor psychological systems (MAPS) model of climate action that integrates these perspectives by mapping influence pathways among seven key actors (i.e., researchers, civil society, policymakers, elites, industry, media, and the public) and identifying the processes mediating these relationships. These actors influence the sociopolitical climate system through mechanisms such as science communication, agenda setting, activism, lobbying, consumer behavior, and electoral politics. We argue that psychological processes, including risk perception, social norms, social identity, elite cueing, motivated reasoning, moral values, efficacy beliefs, and emotional processes, mediate many of these relationships and help explain why scientific knowledge does not consistently translate into policy adoption or behavioral change. By linking micro-level psychological mechanisms with macro-level institutional dynamics through the focus on these seven key actors, the MAPS framework clarifies how climate action emerges, or stalls, within complex sociopolitical systems and highlights leverage points for interventions that could accelerate climate mitigation.