Science Advances Climate

Addressing Climate Change With Behavioral Science: A Global Intervention Tournament in 63 Countries

Madalina Vlasceanu, Kimberly C. Doell, Joseph B. Bak-Coleman, Boryana Todorova, Michael M. Berkebile-Weinberg, Samantha J. Grayson, Yash Patel, Danielle Goldwert, Yifei Pei, Alek Chakroff, Ekaterina Pronizius, Karlijn L. Van Den Broek, Denisa Vlasceanu, Sara Constantino, Michael J. Morais, Philipp Schumann, Steve Rathje, Ke Fang, Salvatore Maria Aglioti, Mark Alfano, Andy J. Alvarado-Yepez, Angélica Andersen, Frederik Anseel, Matthew A. J. Apps, Chillar Asadli, Fonda Jane Awuor, Flavio Azevedo, Piero Basaglia, Jocelyn J. Bélanger, Sebastian Berger, Paul Bertin, Ichał Białek, Olga Bialobrzeska, Michelle Blaya-Burgo, Daniëlle N. M. Bleize, Simen Bø, Lea Boecker, Paulo S. Boggio, Sylvie Borau, Björn Bos, Ayoub Bouguettaya, Markus Brauer, Cameron Brick, Tymofii Brik, Roman Briker, Tobias Brosch, Ondrej Buchel, Daniel Buonauro, Radhika Butalia, Héctor Carvacho, Sarah A. E. Chamberlain, Hang-Yee Chan, Dawn Chow, Dongil Chung, Luca Cian, Noa Cohen-Eick, Luis Sebastian Contreras-Huerta, Davide Contu, Vladimir Cristea, Jo Cutler, Silvana D'ottone, Jonas De Keersmaecker, Sarah Delcourt, Sylvain Delouvée, Kathi Diel, Benjamin D. Douglas, Moritz A. Drupp, Shreya Dubey, Jānis Ekmanis, Christian T. Elbaek, Mahmoud Elsherif, Iris M. Engelhard, Yannik A. Escher, Tom W. Etienne, Laura Farage, Ana Rita Farias, Stefan Feuerriegel, Andrej Findor, Lucia Freira, Malte Friese, Neil Philip Gains, Albina Gallyamova, Sandra J. Geiger, Oliver Genschow, Biljana Gjoneska, Theofilos Gkinopoulos, Beth Goldberg, Amit Goldenberg, Sarah Gradidge, Simone Grassini, Kurt Gray, Sonja Grelle, Siobhán M. Griffin, Lusine Grigoryan, Ani Grigoryan, Dmitry Grigoryev, June Gruber, Johnrev Guilaran, Britt Hadar, Ulf J.J. Hahnel, Eran Halperin, Annelie J. Harvey, Christian A. P. Haugestad, Aleksandra M. Herman, Hal E. Hershfield, Toshiyuki Himichi, Donald W. Hine, Wilhelm Hofmann, Lauren Howe, Enma T. Huaman-Chulluncuy, Guanxiong Huang, Tatsunori Ishii, Ayahito Ito, Fanli Jia, John T. Jost, Veljko Jovanović, Dominika Jurgiel, Ndřej Kácha, Reeta Kankaanpää, Jaroslaw Kantorowicz, Elena Kantorowicz-Reznichenko, Keren Kaplan Mintz, Ilker Kaya, Ozgur Kaya, Narine Khachatryan, Anna Klas, Colin Klein, Christian A. Klöckner, Lina Koppel, Alexandra I. Kosachenko, Emily J. Kothe, Ruth Krebs, Amy R. Krosch, Andre P.M. Krouwel, Yara Kyrychenko, Maria Lagomarsino, Claus Lamm, Florian Lange, Julia Lee Cunningham, Jeffrey Lees, Tak Yan Leung, Neil Levy, Patricia L. Lockwood, Chiara Longoni, Alberto López Ortega, David D. Loschelder, Jackson G. Lu, Yu Luo, Joseph Luomba, Annika E. Lutz, Johann M. Majer, Ezra Markowitz, Abigail A. Marsh, Karen Louise Mascarenhas, Bwambale Mbilingi, Winfred Mbungu, Cillian Mchugh, Marijn H.C. Meijers, Hugo Mercier, Fenant Laurent Mhagama, Katerina Michalakis, Nace Mikus, Sarah Milliron, Panagiotis Mitkidis, Fredy S. Monge-Rodríguez, Youri L. Mora, David Moreau, Kosuke Motoki, Manuel Moyano, Mathilde Mus, Joaquin Navajas, Tam Luong Nguyen, Dung Minh Nguyen, Trieu Nguyen, Laura Niemi, Sari R. R. Nijssen, Gustav Nilsonne, Jonas P. Nitschke, Laila Nockur, Ritah Okura, Sezin Öner, Asil Ali Özdoğru, Helena Palumbo, Costas Panagopoulos, Maria Serena Panasiti, Philip Pärnamets, Mariola Paruzel-Czachura, Yuri G. Pavlov, César Payán-Gómez, Adam R. Pearson, Leonor Pereira Da Costa, Hannes M. Petrowsky, Stefan Pfattheicher, Nhat Tan Pham, Vladimir Ponizovskiy, Clara Pretus, Gabriel G. Rêgo, Ritsaart Reimann, Shawn A. Rhoads, Julian Riano-Moreno, Isabell Richter, Jan Philipp Röer, Jahred Rosa-Sullivan, Robert M. Ross, Anandita Sabherwal, Toshiki Saito, Oriane Sarrasin, Nicolas Say, Katharina Schmid, Michael T. Schmitt, Philipp Schoenegger, Christin Scholz, Mariah G. Schug, Stefan Schulreich, Ganga Shreedhar, Eric Shuman, Smadar Sivan, Hallgeir Sjåstad, Meikel Soliman, Katia Soud, Tobia Spampatti, Gregg Sparkman, Ognen Spasovski, Samantha K. Stanley, Jessica A. Stern, Noel Strahm, Yasushi Suko, Sunhae Sul, Stylianos Syropoulos, Neil C. Taylor, Elisa Tedaldi, Gustav Tinghög, Luu Duc Toan Huynh, Giovanni Antonio Travaglino, Manos Tsakiris, İlayda Tüter, Michael Tyrala, Özden Melis Uluğ, Arkadiusz Urbanek, Danila Valko, Sander Van Der Linden, Kevin Van Schie, Aart Van Stekelenburg, Edmunds Vanags, Daniel Västfjäll, Stepan Vesely, Jáchym Vintr, Marek Vranka, Patrick Otuo Wanguche, Robb Willer, Adrian Dominik Wojcik, Rachel Xu, Anjali Yadav, Magdalena Zawisza, Xian Zhao, Jiaying Zhao, Dawid Żuk, and Jay J. Van Bavel

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.

Citation: Vlasceanu, M., Doell, K. C., Bak-Coleman, J. B., Todorova, B., Berkebile-Weinberg, M. M., Grayson, S. J., Patel, Y., Goldwert, D., Pei, Y., Chakroff, A., Pronizius, E., Van Den Broek, K. L., Vlasceanu, D., Constantino, S., Morais, M. J., Schumann, P., Rathje, S., Fang, K., Aglioti, S. M., . . . Van Bavel, J. J. (2024). Addressing climate change with behavioral science: A global intervention tournament in 63 countries. Science Advances, 10(6), eadj5778. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adj5778

Media: Psychology study unearths ways to bolster global climate awareness and climate action. (2024, February 7). Science Magazine. https://scienmag.com/psychology-study-unearths-ways-to-bolster-global-climate-awareness-and-climate-action/

AMPPS RRR

A Multilab Replication of the Induced-Compliance Paradigm of Cognitive Dissonance

David C. Vaidis, Willem W. A. Sleegers, Florian van Leeuwen, Kenneth G. DeMarree, Bjørn Sætrevik, Robert M. Ross, Kathleen Schmidt, John Protzko, Coby Morvinski, Omid Ghasemi, Andrew J. Roberts, Jeff Stone, Alexandre Bran, Amélie Gourdon-Kanhukamwe, Ceren Gunsoy, Lisa S. Moussaoui, Andrew R. Smith, Armelle Nugier, Marie-Pierre Fayant, Ali H. Al-Hoorie, Obed K. Appiah, Spencer Arbige, Benjamin Aubert-Teillaud, Olga Bialobrzeska, Stéphanie Bordel, Valerian Boudjemadi, Hilmar Brohmer, Quinn Cabooter, Mehdi Chahir, Ianis Chassang, Armand Chatard, Yu Yang Chou, Sungeun Chung, Mioara Cristea, Joséphine Daga, Gregory J. Depow, Olivier Desrichard, Dmitrii Dubrov, Thomas R. Evans, Séverine Falkowicz, Sylvain Ferreira, Tim Figureau, Valérie Fointiat, Théo Friedrich, Anastasia Gashkova, Fabien Girandola, Marine Granjon, Dmitry Grigoryev, Gul Gunaydin, Şevval Güzel, Mahsa Hazrati, Mai Helmy, Ayumi Ikeda, Michael Inzlicht, Sara Jaubert, Dauren Kasanov, Mohammad Mohsen Khoddami, Taenyun Kim, Kiyoshi Kiyokawa, Rabia I. Kodapanakkal, Alexandra Kosachenko, Kortney Maedge, John H. Mahaney, Marie-Amélie Martinie, Vitor N. Mascheretti, Yoriko Matsuda, Maxime Mauduy, Nicolas Mauny, Armand Metzen, Eva Moreno-Bella, Miguel Moya, Kévin Nadarajah, Pegah Nejat, Elisabeth Norman, Irmak Olcaysoy Okten, Asil A. Özdoğru, Ceyda Ozer, Elena Padial-Rojas, Yuri G. Pavlov, Monica Perusquia-Hernandez, Dora Proost, Aleksandra Rabinovitch, Odile Rohmer, Emre Selcuk, Cécile Sénémeaud, Yaniv Shani, Elena A. Shmeleva, Emmelie Simoens, Kaitlin A. Smith, Alain Somat, Hayeon Song, Fatih Sonmez, Lionel Souchet, John J. Taylor, Ilja van Beest, Nicolas Van der Linden, Steven Verheyen, Bruno Verschuere, Kevin Vezirian, Luc Vieira, Sera Wiechert, Guillermo B. Willis, Robin Wollast, Ji Xia, Yuki Yamada, Naoto Yoshimura, and Daniel Priolo

According to cognitive-dissonance theory, performing counterattitudinal behavior produces a state of dissonance that people are motivated to resolve, usually by changing their attitude to be in line with their behavior. One of the most popular experimental paradigms used to produce such attitude change is the induced-compliance paradigm. Despite its popularity, the replication crisis in social psychology and other fields, as well as methodological limitations associated with the paradigm, raise concerns about the robustness of classic studies in this literature. We therefore conducted a multilab constructive replication of the induced-compliance paradigm based on Croyle and Cooper (Experiment 1). In a total of 39 labs from 19 countries and 14 languages, participants (N = 4,898) were assigned to one of three conditions: writing a counterattitudinal essay under high choice, writing a counterattitudinal essay under low choice, or writing a neutral essay under high choice. The primary analyses failed to support the core hypothesis: No significant difference in attitude was observed after writing a counterattitudinal essay under high choice compared with low choice. However, we did observe a significant difference in attitude after writing a counterattitudinal essay compared with writing a neutral essay. Secondary analyses revealed the pattern of results to be robust to data exclusions, lab variability, and attitude assessment. Additional exploratory analyses were conducted to test predictions from cognitive-dissonance theory. Overall, the results call into question whether the induced-compliance paradigm provides robust evidence for cognitive dissonance.

Keywords: Cognitive dissonance, induced compliance, counterattitudinal essay, attitude change, replication, multilabs

Citation: Vaidis, D. C., Sleegers, W. W. A., van Leeuwen, F., DeMarree, K. G., Sætrevik, B., Ross, R. M., Schmidt, K., Protzko, J., Morvinski, C., Ghasemi, O., Roberts, A. J., Stone, J., Bran, A., Gourdon-Kanhukamwe, A., Gunsoy, C., Moussaoui, L. S., Smith, A. R., Nugier, A., Fayant, M.-P., . . . Priolo, D. (2024). A multilab replication of the induced-compliance paradigm of cognitive dissonance. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 7(1), 1-26. https://doi.org/10.1177/25152459231213375

Media: Multilab replication challenges long-held theories on cognitive dissonance. (2024, February 14). Observer. https://www.psychologicalscience.org/publications/observer/multilab-replication-cognitive-dissonance.html