Leaf Van Boven

The United States recently passed major federal laws supporting the energy transition. Analyses suggest that their successful implementation could reduce US emissions more than 40% below 2005 levels by 2030. However, achieving maximal emissions reductions would require frictionless supply and demand responses to the laws’ incentives and implementation that avoids polarization and efforts to repeal or undercut them. In this Perspective, we discuss some of these supply, demand and polarization challenges. We highlight insights from social science research, and identify open questions needing answers, regarding how to address these challenges. The stakes are high. The success of these new laws could catalyse virtuous cycles in the energy transition; their failure could breed cynicism about major government spending on climate change.

We review findings from social psychology and related fields to examine the bidirectional relationship between the public—what are their views about climate change and the need for policies to address the climate crisis—and the politicians who are making (or not making) climate policy and beholden to electoral constraints. We illustrate social psychological pressures that influence policy support and their relevance to how policies emerge from coordinated action and how barriers impede policy progress. We review two factors that have been the focus of research within communication, political science, and psychology and that are relevant to how climate policies are promoted (or undermined): activists and the media. We examine the process by which activists amplify and transmit the preferences of the public to politicians, and how research on persuasion and social norms helps understand how this effect can …

The world faces the grand challenge of providing sustainable prosperity: how do we continue to improve standards of living worldwide while reducing environmental footprints and eliminating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions? Technology is a crucial component of meeting this challenge. Nuclear energy, hydropower, and wind and solar technologies can reduce GHG associated with energy production and consumption, replacing carbon-intensive energy sources with less carbon-intensive or carbon–neutral sources (International Energy Agency (IEA), 2023). New technologies in drought-resistant crops, seawalls, efficient building practices, and forecasting systems can facilitate societal adaptation to new challenges from climate change and other environmental stresses (Pörtner et al. 2022). Technologies in carbon removal, such as direct air carbon capture and soil sequestration, can supplement mitigation efforts …

Decarbonization policies are frequently combined with other policies to increase public support or address related societal issues. To investigate the consequences of policy bundling, we conducted a survey experiment with 2,521 US adults. We examined the effects of bundling decarbonization with policies favored by liberals (social justice and economic redistribution), broad bipartisan coalitions (infrastructure), and conservatives (pausing EPA regulations) on public support and polarization. Bundling with pausing EPA regulations decreased support and polarization by reducing liberal supportwithout significantly increasing conservative support. Bundling with social justice decreased support while increasing polarization by reducing conservative support without significantly increasing liberal support. Bundling with economic redistribution and infrastructure did not significantly change support or polarization. Policy …

The widespread demand for animal-sourced foods poses challenges in addressing climate change due to their significant greenhouse gas emissions. Alternative proteins like cultured meat show promise with lower greenhouse gas emissions, but have faced public resistance, posing substantial barriers to their broad development and adoption. This paper reports a survey that examined the perceived naturalness of protein sources as an important factor that predicts perceived risks, benefits, and support for consumption. A diverse sample from the United States considered six different protein technologies, including three newer alternative proteins such as cultured meat and three more conventional proteins. Newer alternative proteins were perceived as less natural and were less supported than conventional proteins. Additionally, the more participants perceived protein sources as natural, the less risky and more …

Two experiments examined the polarization of public support for COVID-19 policies due to people’s (lack of) trust in political leaders and nonpartisan experts. In diverse samples in the United States (Experiment 1; N = 1,802) and the United Kingdom (Experiment 2; N = 1,825), participants evaluated COVID-19 policies that were framed as proposed by ingroup political leaders, outgroup political leaders, nonpartisan experts, or, in the United States, a bipartisan group of political leaders. At the time of the study in April 2020, COVID-19 was an unfamiliar and shared threat. Therefore, there were theoretical reasons suggesting that attitudes toward COVID-19 policy may not have been politically polarized. Yet, our results demonstrated that even relatively early in the pandemic people supported policies from ingroup political leaders more than the same policies from outgroup leaders, extending prior research on how …

An understanding of cause and effect is central to the design of effective environmental policies and programs. But environmental scientists and practitioners typically rely on field experience, case studies, and retrospective evaluations of programs that were not designed to generate evidence about cause and effect. Using such methods can lead to ineffective or even counterproductive programs. To help strengthen inferences about cause and effect, environmental organizations could rely more on formal experimentation within their programs, which would leverage the power of science while maintaining a “learning by doing” approach. Although formal experimentation is a cornerstone of science and is increasingly embedded in nonenvironmental social programs, it is virtually absent in environmental programs. We highlight key obstacles to such experimentation and suggest opportunities to overcome them.

This pre-registered work tests the replicability of seven studies covering the most important effects associated with mental accounting across 5,589 participants from 21 countries. Findings support the robustness of the original studies across time and culture, confirming the role of mental accounting as a critical driver of human decision-making.

People believe they should consider how their behavior might negatively impact other people, Yet their behavior often increases others’ health risks. This creates challenges for managing public health crises like the COVID-19 pandemic. We examined a procedure wherein people reflect on their personal criteria regarding how their behavior impacts others’ health risks. We expected structured reflection to increase people's intentions and decisions to reduce others’ health risks. Structured reflection increases attention to others’ health risks and the correspondence between people's personal criteria and behavioral intentions. In four experiments during COVID-19, people (N  = 12,995) reported their personal criteria about how much specific attributes, including the impact on others’ health risks, should influence their behavior. Compared with control conditions, people who engaged in structured reflection …

Most people in the United States recognize the reality of climate change and are concerned about its consequences, yet climate change is a low priority relative to other policy issues. Recognizing that belief in climate change does not necessarily translate to prioritizing climate policy, we examine psychological factors that may boost or inhibit prioritization. We hypothesized that perceived social norms from people’s own political party influence their climate policy prioritization beyond their personal belief in climate change. In Study 1, a large, diverse sample of Democratic and Republican participants (N = 887) reported their prioritization of climate policy relative to other issues. Participants’ perceptions of their political ingroup’s social norms about climate policy prioritization were the strongest predictor of personal climate policy prioritization—stronger even than participants’ belief in climate change, political …

People experience the past and the future in fundamentally different ways. From the perspective of the present, the past has happened whereas the future is yet to be. The past recedes and the future draws near. Present actions extend in and affect the future, but those same actions can never influence the past. In their daily thoughts, people are primarily concerned with the future—what they will eat, where they will go, with whom who they will associate, what type of job they will get in a few years,, and so on (Baumeister et al., 2020; Killingsworth and Gilbert, 2010). For most people most of the time, the future looms larger than the past. Since at least James (1890), psychologists have examined how people retrospect about the past and prospect about the future. Evidence from cognitive neuroscience suggests that the brain has structures uniquely associated with such mental time travel (Addis, Wong, and Schacter, 2007; Ingvar, 1985; Schacter, Addis, and Buckner, 2007;

Although political polarization in the United States is real, intense, and increasing, partisans consistently overestimate its magnitude. This ‘false polarization’ is insidious because it reinforces actual polarization and inhibits compromise. We review empirical research on false polarization and the related phenomenon of negative meta-perceptions, and we propose three cognitive and affective processes that likely contribute to these phenomena: categorical thinking, oversimplification, and emotional amplification. Finally, we review several interventions that have shown promise in mitigating these biases.

Political polarization impeded public support for policies to reduce the spread of COVID-19, much as polarization hinders responses to other contemporary challenges. Unlike previous theory and research that focused on the United States, the present research examined the effects of political elite cues and affective polarization on support for policies to manage the COVID-19 pandemic in seven countries (n = 12,955): Brazil, Israel, Italy, South Korea, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Across countries, cues from political elites polarized public attitudes toward COVID-19 policies. Liberal and conservative respondents supported policies proposed by ingroup politicians and parties more than the same policies from outgroup politicians and parties. Respondents disliked, distrusted, and felt cold toward outgroup political elites, whereas they liked, trusted, and felt warm toward both ingroup political …

The present study, conducted immediately after the 2020 presidential election in the United States, examined whether Democrats’ and Republicans’ polarized assessments of election legitimacy increased over time. In a naturalistic survey experiment, people (N = 1,236) were randomly surveyed either during the week following Election Day, with votes cast but the outcome unknown, or during the following week, after President Joseph Biden was widely declared the winner. The design unconfounded the election outcome announcement from the vote itself, allowing more precise testing of predictions derived from cognitive dissonance theory. As predicted, perceived election legitimacy increased among Democrats, from the first to the second week following Election Day, as their expected Biden win was confirmed, whereas perceived election legitimacy decreased among Republicans as their expected President Trump win was disconfirmed. From the first to the second week following Election Day, Republicans reported stronger negative emotions and weaker positive emotions while Democrats reported stronger positive emotions and weaker negative emotions. The polarized perceptions of election legitimacy were correlated with the tendencies to trust and consume polarized media. Consumption of Fox News was associated with lowered perceptions of election legitimacy over time whereas consumption of other outlets was associated with higher perceptions of election legitimacy over time. Discussion centers on the role of the media in the experience of cognitive dissonance and the implications of polarized perceptions of election legitimacy for …

HighlightsPolitical elite stances influence support for climate policy, beyond ideology, climate concern, and individual differences.Social norms drive elite influence, which depends on inference that political ingroups follow elites.People are more influenced by assimilating to perceived stances of their ingroup than by contrasting from their outgroup.Communication from political elites elicits anger and affective polarization on divisive topics like climate policy.Despite changing norms that climate change requires immediate action, elites polarization poses barriers to climate action.Public attitudes about climate policy are shaped by social identities, norms, and other sociocultural factors. Recent research demonstrates the impact of cues from policy makers and other political elites on support for climate policies, and the processes by which elite cues perpetuate political polarization. Elite cues convey information about …

Citizen activists play a role in translating public concern about the climate crisis to policymakers and elevating it on the political agenda. We consider the dynamic between citizen activists and the decision-makers they seek to influence and we review psychological research relevant to advocating for climate legislation. We conducted a study with citizen activists who lobby the US Congress for a carbon pricing policy to address climate change. The study assessed how activists think about four social psychological approaches: affirmation, social norms, legacy and immediacy. The findings provide a window into activists’ intuitions about which strategies to use, whom to use them with and their perceived effectiveness. A strategy of establishing shared values and common ground (affirmation) was used most frequently overall. A strategy emphasizing the long-term costs and benefits of addressing climate change (legacy …

Global climate change is the largest existential threat of our time. Glaciers are retreating, sea levels are rising, extreme weather is intensifying and the last four years have been the hottest on record (NASA, 2020; World Meteorological Organization, 2020). Although climate change is already significantly impacting natural and human systems around the world, mitigating further and potentially disastrous climate change will require large-scale individual and collective action, including public support for mitigation policies, as well as the more rapid development and implementation of adaptation plans (van der Linden et al., 2015; Pearson et al., 2016).

The authors suggest that mere attention increases the perceived severity of environmental risks because attention increases the fear and distinctiveness of attended risks. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were exposed to images of multiple environmental risks, with attention repeatedly oriented to a subset of these risks. Participants subsequently perceived attended risks to be more severe, more frightening, higher priority, and more distinctive than control risks. In Experiments 3 and 4, spatial cueing manipulations were used to briefly draw attention toward some risks and away from others. In Experiment 3, a briefly flashed rectangle drew attention toward one side of a computer screen just before 2 images depicting different risks appeared: 1 image near to where the rectangle appeared and 1 further away. In Experiment 4, incidental attention was cued toward some risks by giving participants an unrelated letter …

Attention is integral to mental simulation. Imagining how an event will be, was, or could have been requires attention to the event and its alternatives. How does mere attention influence people’s perception and experience of events? How does attention influence people’s emotions, judgments, and decisions? And do these attentional influences explain the effects of mental simulation? We consider these questions by reviewing the scientific literature that examines how attention influences experience, emotion, and behavior. Attention enhances perceptual experience by making objects more vivid, salient, and clear. Attention also reduces interference from unattended stimuli and increases memory accessibility of attended objects. Partly because of these effects, attention increases emotional intensity of attended objects. Attending to goals, budget categories, and attributes also increases their prioritization and weight …

The adoption of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies at a scale sufficient to draw down carbon emissions will require both individual and collective decisions that happen over time in different locations to enable a massive scale-up. Members of the public and other decision-makers have not yet formed strong attitudes, beliefs and preferences about most of the individual CDR technologies or taken positions on policy mechanisms and tax-payer support for CDR. Much of the current discourse among scientists, policy analysts and policy-makers about CDR implicitly assumes that decision-makers will exhibit unbiased, rational behaviour that weighs the costs and benefits of CDR. In this paper, we review behavioural decision theory and discuss how public reactions to CDR will be different from and more complex than that implied by rational choice theory. Given that people do not form attitudes and opinions in a …