Some individuals experience such intense worry about climate change that they may develop impairment-based climate anxiety, which is characterized by cognitive, affective, and functional impairments. In this online study (n = 359), we examined whether self-reported pro-environmental behaviors and suppression of thoughts about climate change worsen the relationship between self-reported climate worry and impairment-based climate anxiety. First, climate worry appeared to predict both the severity of climate anxiety and engagement in private pro-environmental behaviors. Second, both public pro-environmental behaviors and thought suppression predicted the severity of climate anxiety, though neither pro-environmental behaviors nor climate change thought suppression moderated the effect of climate worry on impairment-based climate anxiety. Taken together, these findings raise questions about whether it is possible to distinguish between forms of climate anxiety associated with pro-environmental behavior and those associated with impairments.

This research aimed at investigating the respective roles of contextual (e.g., the ecological crisis experience) and individual factors (e.g., trait anxiety) in the elicitation of “eco-emotions”. Study 1 (N = 190) tested the extent to which the experience of climate change influences the experience of eco-emotions depending on how it is appraised. The results showed that, after reading a vignette describing climate change as a threat, a great loss, another-blame, or a self-blame, participants’ anxiety, fear, sadness, anger, and guilt differed very little from one another. Study 2 (N = 1302) investigated the best predictors of eco-emotions. It revealed that participants’ state anxiety and affect after an indirect experience of climate change and other events depended mainly on anxiety predispositions. Study 2 also suggested that the eco-emotions of climate anxiety and solastalgia—the latter comprising self-centered and other-centered concerns—were differentially associated with situational and individual factors: other-centered solastalgia is more strongly associated with environmental attitudes, while severe climate anxiety is more strongly associated with subjective experience of climate change, trait anxiety, and pro-environmental behaviors. Taken together, it appears that individual factors play a greater role than the experience of climate change in the elicitation of eco-emotions. Results are discussed in terms of future research avenues for understanding eco-emotions in their link with pro-environmental behavior.

When processing and analyzing empirical data, researchers regularly face choices that may appear arbitrary (e.g., how to define and handle outliers). If one chooses to exclusively focus on a particular option and conduct a single analysis, its outcome might be of limited utility. That is, one remains agnostic regarding the generalizability of the results, because plausible alternative paths remain unexplored. A multiverse analysis offers a solution to this issue by exploring the various choices pertaining to data-processing and/or model building, and examining their impact on the conclusion of a study. However, even though multiverse analyses are arguably less susceptible to biases compared to the typical single-pathway approach, it is still possible to selectively add or omit pathways. To address this issue, we outline a novel, more principled approach to conducting multiverse analyses through crowdsourcing. The approach is detailed in a step-by-step tutorial to facilitate its implementation. We also provide a worked-out illustration featuring the Semantic Priming Across Many Languages project, thereby demonstrating its feasibility and its ability to increase objectivity and transparency. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

According to the justified true belief (JTB) account of knowledge, people can truly know something only if they have a belief that is both justified and true (i.e., knowledge is JTB). This account was challenged by Gettier, who argued that JTB does not explain knowledge attributions in certain situations, later called "Gettier-type cases," wherein protagonists are justified in believing something to be true, but their belief was correct only because of luck. Laypeople may not attribute knowledge to protagonists with justified but only luckily true beliefs. Although some research has found evidence for these so-called Gettier intuitions, Turri et al. found no evidence that participants attributed knowledge in a counterfeit-object Gettier-type case differently than in a matched case of JTB. In a large-scale, cross-cultural conceptual replication of Turri and colleagues' Experiment 1 (N = 4,724) using a within-participants design and three vignettes across 19 geopolitical regions, we did find evidence for Gettier intuitions; participants were 1.86 times more likely to attribute knowledge to protagonists in standard cases of JTB than to protagonists in Gettier-type cases. These results suggest that Gettier intuitions may be detectable across different scenarios and cultural contexts. However, the size of the Gettier intuition effect did vary by vignette, and the Turri et al. vignette produced the smallest effect, which was similar in size to that observed in the original study. Differences across vignettes suggest that epistemic intuitions may also depend on contextual factors unrelated to the criteria of knowledge, such as the characteristics of the protagonist being evaluated.

Scholars have noted several connections between the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate crisis, ranging from the material influence of the pandemic on climate change processes (e.g., how lockdowns temporarily lowered climate emissions) to the similar ways the crises have been managed. Both crises are also global in scope, have exerted a significant toll on human lives and require major changes in our lifestyles. However, while collective responses to COVID-19 were rapid and concerted, efforts to address climate change continue to be met with resistance. In this article, we investigate the social vulnerabilities common to both crises and the lessons that policymakers in the climate field can take away from the pandemic. After outlining the theoretical and empirical similarities between the two crises, we present a general framework and recommendations for the use of social science-based interventions. We focus on two broad topics of contemporary interest that lay bare social vulnerabilities of the coronavirus pandemic-conspiracy theories and racial and ethnic inequities-to highlight the ways that understanding social and psychological processes associated with the pandemic can help inform more efficient climate policies.Public Significance StatementThis paper shows how the COVID-19 pandemic's social and psychological lessons can guide climate change policies. By leveraging social science insights, we propose strategies and illustrations to combat misinformation and address social inequities, ultimately fostering more effective and inclusive climate actions and benefiting policymakers and society at large.

Do people in different societies experience morality differently in everyday life? Using experience sampling methods, we investigate everyday moral experiences in a sample from 20 countries across 6 continents, thereby replicating and extending a large-scale study originally conducted in the United States and Canada. We aim to replicate key findings about the kinds of moral experiences people have, the relationship between such experiences and religious or political affiliation, how such experiences affect momentary feelings, and how such experiences influence moral behavior. An international sample enables us to assess the generalizability of these findings across different socio-cultural contexts.

We do not see the world as it is: distortions of visual perception can occur depending on the goals we wish to achieve ("wishful seeing"). Following functionalist theories of emotions (e.g., "feeling is for doing"), visual perception biases could also be involved in the link between emotion and specific behavior. Previous research has shown that anger can modify visual perception towards ambiguous menacing stimuli, or that fear can similarly direct our attention and perception towards threatening stimuli (e.g., weapons). The aim of our research was to replicate these effects by directly comparing the effects of these two emotions on perceptual biases and by relying on general mixed models to control Type I errors and reduce the risk related to the non-independence between observations. Our results partially replicate a perceptual bias toward threatening objects for both emotions although this effect depends on the type of stimulus and of the emotional dimension involved. These results are discussed in terms of the impact of emotions in attentional and perceptual processes and in relation to alternative theoretical explanations for motivated perception.

The present study examined whether prosocial reasons to comply with anti-COVID measures were related to pro-environmental behaviours (PEB), as both have in common that they were/are mostly performed to help others. We investigated two mediating psychological mechanisms: perceived interdependencies between the self and others, and reduced climate change psychological distance. Latent class analyses applied to data from an online study conducted in France, Switzerland, the UK, and Spain (Ntot = 967) revealed five different ‘environmental’ profiles. Path models showed that prosocial reasons for complying with anti-COVID measures were related to the most congruent profiles (the ‘strongly committed’, frequent PEB/strong pro-environmental intentions, and the ‘strongly disengaged’, infrequent PEB/low intentions) through a reduced vs. heightened psychological distance of climate change. Prosocial reasons were not related to the three other profiles. However, a reduced vs. heightened psychological distance between COVID-19 and the self was related to perceived interdependencies, which were then related to the two most incongruent profiles: the ‘well-meaning’ and the ‘committed to private PEB’. We discuss these results to the extent that they inform on (a) the relevance of using a profile-approach, (b) the way to measure the psychological distance of different global crises, and (c) the relevance of pursuing research on perceived interdependencies as predictors of PEB.

Scholars have noted several connections between the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate crisis, ranging from the material influence of the pandemic on climate change processes (e.g., how lockdowns temporarily lowered climate emissions) to the similar ways the crises have been managed. Both crises are also global in scope, have exerted a significant toll in human lives and require major changes in our lifestyles. However, while collective responses to the COVID-19 were rapid and concerted, efforts to address climate change continue to be met with resistance. In this article, we investigate the social vulnerabilities common to both crises and the lessons that social scientists interested in climate change, and psychologists in particular, can take away from the pandemic. We focus on two broad topics of contemporary interest that lay bare social vulnerabilities of the coronavirus pandemic – conspiracy theories and racial and ethnic inequities – to highlight the ways that understanding psychological processes associated with the pandemic can help inform more efficient climate policies. We end by discussing recommendations as well as a framework to guide the application of psychological science findings to help address climate change.

The study of moral judgements often centres on moral dilemmas in which options consistent with deontological perspectives (that is, emphasizing rules, individual rights and duties) are in conflict with options consistent with utilitarian judgements (that is, following the greater good based on consequences). Greene et al. (2009) showed that psychological and situational factors (for example, the intent of the agent or the presence of physical contact between the agent and the victim) can play an important role in moral dilemma judgements (for example, the trolley problem). Our knowledge is limited concerning both the universality of these effects outside the United States and the impact of culture on the situational and psychological factors affecting moral judgements. Thus, we empirically tested the universality of the effects of intent and personal force on moral dilemma judgements by replicating the experiments of Greene et al. in 45 countries from all inhabited continents. We found that personal force and its interaction with intention exert influence on moral judgements in the US and Western cultural clusters, replicating and expanding the original findings. Moreover, the personal force effect was present in all cultural clusters, suggesting it is culturally universal. The evidence for the cultural universality of the interaction effect was inconclusive in the Eastern and Southern cultural clusters (depending on exclusion criteria). We found no strong association between collectivism/individualism and moral dilemma judgements. Including participants from 45 countries, Bago et al. find that the situational factors that affect moral reasoning are shared across countries, with diminished observed cultural variation.

A growing body of evidence suggests that emotional states under which individuals perform decision-making tasks modulate performance. Studies have mainly reported that negative emotions can differentially increase or decrease performance by modulating feedback processing. In contrast, differential influences of specific emotions inside positive valence have been poorly investigated. The objective of the present work was to assess specific effect of different types of positive emotions on decision-making and to investigate whether this effect also depends on feedback processing. In our study, after being induced to feel either hope or happiness, participants undertook a risky sequential decision-making task in which feedback was required to obtain a good performance. We found that the more positive was the feedback received, the more happiness led participants to make risky decisions. This tendency was not observed among participants in the hopeful or in the control condition. Our results contribute to the literature showing that the effects of emotions on sequential decision-making performance can be explained by feedback processing and are not solely due to the valence of the emotional state. They also suggest that further research is required to determine which potential specific dimension is involved in the effects of positive emotions on sequential decision-making.

Global climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic that are among the most pressing societal crises share multiple links. It has been shown for instance, that the measures to fight against the coronavirus may impact (at least for a while) greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, the COVID-19 can serve as a prototypical example for climate change, demonstrating how global crises may become personally relevant and certain. Here, our aim was to investigate whether explicit reference to the COVID-19 crisis in communication messages on global climate change could enhance message effectiveness. Through two pre-registered studies (Ntotal = 651), we examined whether the use of factual elements stressing the certainty dimension of the COVID-19 pandemic (Study 1) or the use of arguments linking COVID-19 and climate change framed in terms of “positive” or “negative” outcomes (Study 2) could impact the effectiveness of climate messages. Results did not show that messages aiming to increase the certainty of the climate crisis by linking it to the COVID-19 pandemic increased perceived message effectiveness. However, we have found that emotional framing influenced perceived message effectiveness, but not pro-environmental behaviour. Results are discussed in terms of the impact of the concepts of certainty, message framing and emotions on climate change communication. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Much research on moral judgment is centered on moral dilemmas in which deontological perspectives (i.e., emphasizing rules, individual rights and duties) are in conflict with utilitarian judgements (i.e., following the greater good defined through consequences). A central finding of this field Greene et al. showed that psychological and situational factors (e.g., the intent of the agent, or physical contact between the agent and the victim) play an important role in people’s use of deontological versus utilitarian considerations when making moral decisions. As their study was conducted with US samples, our knowledge is limited concerning the universality of this effect, in general, and the impact of culture on the situational and psychological factors of moral judgments, in particular. Here, we empirically test the universality of deontological and utilitarian judgments by replicating Greene et al.’s experiments on a large (N = X,XXX) and diverse (WEIRD and non-WEIRD) sample across the world to explore the influence of culture on moral judgment. The relevance of this exploration to a broad range of policy-making problems is discussed.

Guilt appeals in the field of persuasion are quite common. However, the effectiveness of these messages is sometimes ambivalent. It is widely acknowledged that guilt leads people to engage into prosocial behaviors, but the effects of guilt can also be counter-productive (e.g., reactance-like effects). We argue that the explanations for these contradictions remain unsatisfactory and suggest that taking into account the implications of underlying cognitive-especially attentional-mechanisms would provide a better understanding of these paradoxical outcomes. This article provides a brief review of the literature on the link between guilt and pro-social behaviors and its classical interpretations. We propose a reinterpretation of this link by taking into account specific attentional processes triggered by the emotion of guilt. Attentional biases are, in our opinion, better predictors of the effectiveness of a message than the amount of emotion induced by the same message. This consideration should guide future research in the field of guilt appeals and pro-social behaviors. Implications, in terms of a broader comprehension of the emotion-behavior association in decision making processes, are discussed.

It is widely assumed that guilt leads people to engage into reparatory behaviors. However, the processes underlying this effect are in need for further specification. Four studies tested potential underlying cognitive mechanisms. Results suggest that guilt increases attention toward positive and reparation-oriented cues (Study 1) and makes attitudes toward reparation-oriented primes more positive (Study 3). No effect was found for accessibility of reparation words (Studies 2a, b). Taken together, these results suggest that guilt leads people to pay more attention to reparation means and to develop a more positive attitude toward reparation means, but does not render reparatory means more accessible. Implications for a better knowledge of guilt’s behavioral consequences are discussed.

Emotions can be seen as serving behavior. However, the mechanisms underlying this association are in need for further specification. This paper aims at exploring these potential processes in the case of guilt. It is widely assumed that guilt leads people to engage into reparatory behavior, but this link is not systematic and guilt could also trigger reactance like effects. We suggest that taking into account the implication of attentional processes would provide a better understanding of these paradoxical outcomes. Implications in terms of a broader understanding of the emotion - behavior association are discussed.

Résumé Les émotions servent à orienter nos comportements. Toutefois, les mécanismes qui sous-tendent ce lien demeurent mal connus. Cet article propose d’explorer ces processus dans la relation émotion-comportement à travers une émotion particulière, la culpabilité, qui présente l’avantage d’être classiquement associée à une tendance comportementale spécifique, la « réparation ». Alors que ce lien est parfois présenté comme avéré, une analyse des travaux indique que ce lien n’est pas systématique, et que la culpabilité peut aussi provoquer des comportements de type « réactance ». Notre analyse suggère que la prise en compte des processus attentionnels pourrait permettre de mieux comprendre les effets paradoxaux de la culpabilité. L’implication de ces réflexions sur la compréhension de l’effet des émotions sur les comportements est discutée.

Guilt is generally assumed to motivate a desire to repair and to promote prosocial behavior. However, recent research suggests that this link is not automatic and that guilt may sometimes lead to negative social outcomes. Four experiments tested the causal influence of incidental guilt on pro-environmental attitude and behavior considered as a specific category of general prosocial behavior. Results indicate that guilt may indeed promote general prosocial (pro-environmental) behavior, but that it requires the presence of reparation suggestions in order to trigger prosocial behavior. Moreover, this link is fragile and can be reversed when reparatory means are blatantly offered by the guilt inducer. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for research on guilt and for the role of guilt in persuasive communication.