Browsing by Author "Van Bavel, Jay J."

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Citation - WoS: 59
Citation - Scopus: 58
Addressing Climate Change With Behavioral Science: a Global Intervention Tournament in 63 Countries
(Amer Assoc Advancement Science, 2024) Vlasceanu, Madalina; Doell, Kimberly C.; Bak-Coleman, Joseph B.; Todorova, Boryana; Berkebile-Weinberg, Michael M.; Grayson, Samantha J.; Van Bavel, Jay J.
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 - WoS: 0
Citation - Scopus: 1
The International Climate Psychology Collaboration: Climate Change-Related Data Collected From 63 Countries
(Nature Portfolio, 2024) Doell, Kimberly C.; Todorova, Boryana; Vlasceanu, Madalina; Coleman, Joseph B. Bak; Pronizius, Ekaterina; Schumann, Philipp; Van Bavel, Jay J.
Climate change is currently one of humanity's greatest threats. To help scholars understand the psychology of climate change, we conducted an online quasi-experimental survey on 59,508 participants from 63 countries (collected between July 2022 and July 2023). In a between-subjects design, we tested 11 interventions designed to promote climate change mitigation across four outcomes: climate change belief, support for climate policies, willingness to share information on social media, and performance on an effortful pro-environmental behavioural task. Participants also reported their demographic information (e.g., age, gender) and several other independent variables (e.g., political orientation, perceptions about the scientific consensus). In the no-intervention control group, we also measured important additional variables, such as environmentalist identity and trust in climate science. We report the collaboration procedure, study design, raw and cleaned data, all survey materials, relevant analysis scripts, and data visualisations. This dataset can be used to further the understanding of psychological, demographic, and national-level factors related to individual-level climate action and how these differ across countries.
Citation - WoS: 192
Citation - Scopus: 239
National Identity Predicts Public Health Support During a Global Pandemic
(Nature Portfolio, 2022) Van Bavel, Jay J.; Cichocka, Aleksandra; Capraro, Valerio; Sjastad, Hallgeir; Nezlek, John B.; Pavlovic, Tomislav; Alfano, Mark
Understanding collective behaviour is an important aspect of managing the pandemic response. Here the authors show in a large global study that participants that reported identifying more strongly with their nation reported greater engagement in public health behaviours and support for public health policies in the context of the pandemic. Changing collective behaviour and supporting non-pharmaceutical interventions is an important component in mitigating virus transmission during a pandemic. In a large international collaboration (Study 1, N = 49,968 across 67 countries), we investigated self-reported factors associated with public health behaviours (e.g., spatial distancing and stricter hygiene) and endorsed public policy interventions (e.g., closing bars and restaurants) during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic (April-May 2020). Respondents who reported identifying more strongly with their nation consistently reported greater engagement in public health behaviours and support for public health policies. Results were similar for representative and non-representative national samples. Study 2 (N = 42 countries) conceptually replicated the central finding using aggregate indices of national identity (obtained using the World Values Survey) and a measure of actual behaviour change during the pandemic (obtained from Google mobility reports). Higher levels of national identification prior to the pandemic predicted lower mobility during the early stage of the pandemic (r = -0.40). We discuss the potential implications of links between national identity, leadership, and public health for managing COVID-19 and future pandemics.