Annika M. Wyss

Political polarization and increasing exposure to extreme weather can shape public engagement with climate change, yet the underlying psychological mechanisms remain unclear. In this Registered Report, we examine how political affiliation, extreme weather exposure and subjective attribution influence climate-relevant information search and decision-making in a US sample ( N = 1,451). We combined a process-tracing paradigm within an incentivized decision task involving real carbon emissions with objective data on extreme weather exposure. Democrats attended more to carbon emission information and made more pro-climate choices than Republicans, with no evidence of moderation by objective extreme weather exposure. The subjective attribution of extreme weather to climate change was associated with greater attention to carbon information, more pro-climate choices and moderated the effects of exposure on both outcomes. These findings highlight the importance of political affiliation in climate-relevant decision-making and suggest that extreme weather effects depend less on exposure itself than on how these experiences are interpreted.

Here, we share some lessons from our "file drawer", reflecting on the Carbon Emission Task (Berger & Wyss, 2021, Journal of Environmental Psychology)

Behavioural public policy has received broad research attention, particularly in the domain of motivating pro-environmental behaviours. We investigate how far the efficacy of arguably one the most popular behavioural policy tools (green ‘default change’ nudges) depends on the associated cost. On the basis of a field study involving carbon offsets for over 30,000 flights booked by more than 11,000 airline customers, we show that green defaults have a large effect on voluntary climate action, even when several hundreds of Euros are at stake. The effect fully vanishes only as costs approach approximately €800.

Espite a strong scientific consensus about the existence of anthropogenic climate change, widespread scepticism in the general population continues to exist. Past research has largely relied on self-reported behaviours or behavioural intentions when investigating downstream ‘behavioural’ consequences of climate change denial. As a consequence, there remains a large gap in the literature about how belief in climate change interacts with the pursuit of self-interested, environmentally harmful behaviours. To fill that gap, the present research uses a novel, experimental economic paradigm that allows to attach true environmental consequences to laboratory decisions. Based on ∼56 000 pollution decisions from 2273 participants in more than 30 countries, we find that belief in climate change meaningfully affects decision-making. Our results show that climate change scepticism predicts self-interested choices and showcases that sceptics have an insensitive acceptance of emissions, reaping benefits no matter how large the climate cost are or how small the personal benefits become. Therefore, our results critically augment meta-analytic evidence arguing that downstream behavioural consequences are small to medium in their effect size. We discuss the use of experimental economic paradigms as a crucial innovation tool for psychological research addressing people’s willingness to engage in climate action.