Carbon dioxide removal and low-carbon energy technologies offer promising methods to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, yet widespread deployment depends on public support. Two studies in the United States examined how naturalness shapes public support for six carbon dioxide removal and four low-carbon energy technologies. To the degree that participants in Study 1 perceived technologies as more natural, they supported them more, judging them as less risky and frightening, and more beneficial. In an experimental manipulation in Study 2, participants who considered technologies analogized as natural supported them more, perceiving them as less risky, more beneficial, and more positive than when the same technologies were analogized as artificial. The effect of naturalness on support was especially large among those more averse to tampering with nature. Individual-level political ideology did not moderate the effect of naturalness. These findings advance research on public support for sustainability technology, informing design, investment, and communications. In the United States, people prefer to support carbon dioxide removal and low-carbon energy technologies that they perceive as more natural, less risky, and beneficial, according to an analysis that uses a survey and statistical approach.

Sustainability technologies are critical for addressing climate change, yet public opposition can hinder their adoption. Recent research shows that perceptions of naturalness influence public support for technology. Naturalness is a multidimensional psychological construct. Technologies are seen as natural if they involve minimal processing, align with ecological norms, and are culturally aligned. More natural technologies, like afforestation, solar energy, and plant-based foods, are viewed as safer, more beneficial, familiar, and positive garnering greater public support than less natural technologies like direct air capture, nuclear energy, or lab-grown meat. People with heightened aversion to altering natural systems are particularly swayed by a technology's perceived artificialness or naturalness. Naturalness is thus a core factor shaping public reactions to sustainability technologies, and understanding this concept can enhance communication strategies aimed at reducing public resistance.

Introduction: Dynamic occupational environments, such as construction sites, present workers with frequent changes, some of which pose serious risk. Workers are expected to detect and respond to these changes using sensory cues, including auditory warnings intentionally designed to draw attention to hazardous conditions. However, these cues often compete with high cognitive load, which can result in missed warning sounds, a phenomenon known as inattentional deafness. This study examines susceptibility to inattentional deafness during a simulated construction task. Method: Data were collected from 136 participants, including 72 individuals and 64 participants who worked in 32 pairs. All participants completed a mechanical–electrical assembly in a controlled laboratory environment with continuous construction noise. Before the task, participants received a brief pre-job-style briefing instructing them to stop work and move to a designated safety zone upon hearing any sound that could indicate hazardous energy. During the task, participants were randomly assigned to hear either an Air Horn or a Hissing cue and to work individually or collaboratively. Each participant (or pair) received three successive bursts of the assigned cue at 81, 83, and 85 dB presented at random intervals. Results: Overall detection was 62%, with individuals detecting 58%, while pairs detected 71%. Sound type was the strongest determinant of noticeability, as the Air Horn was detected significantly more often than the Hissing cue. Increasing volume produced modest improvements in detection, and pair collaboration was beneficial, although the improvement did not fully align with probabilistic expectations of redundancy. Human factors such as fatigue, emotional state, and perceived task difficulty did not significantly predict detection. Conclusions and Practical Applications: These findings underscore the importance of highly distinguishable auditory warnings and system-level designs that account for the inherent limitations of human attention in safety–critical work environments.

Abstract First introduced four decades ago, the influential concept of mental accounting—how people mentally organize, evaluate, and track financial activities—posits that consumers often defy traditional economic rationality, treating money as non-fungible across discrete mental accounts. In this research, we present the first large-scale test of the replicability and generalizability of mental accounting effects, using a sample of 5,589 participants from 21 countries. Our results demonstrate that mental accounting effects are replicable, robust, and generalizable. Hierarchical Bayesian meta-analyses revealed a 100% replication rate for all tested scenarios, while unpooled analyses showed a 90.5% replication rate (133/147 effects). Further analysis found that effects observed in higher-income countries may be weaker in lower-income countries. Multidimensional scaling suggested that mental accounting effects vary along three interpretable dimensions that reflect social context (individual vs interactive decisions), decision perspective (deciding for self vs other), and role in price determination (setting vs evaluating prices). Across a diverse population and controlling for multiple factors, we show that consumers make decisions based on mentally-formed accounts that consistently diverge from their objective financial value.

Addressing climate change depends on large-scale system changes, which require public advocacy. Here, we identified and tested 17 expert-crowdsourced theory-informed behavioral interventions designed to promote public, political, and financial advocacy in a large quota-matched sample of US residents (n = 31,324). The most consistently effective intervention emphasized both the collective efficacy and emotional benefits of climate action, increasing advocacy by up to 10 percentage points. This was also the top intervention among participants identifying as Democrats. Appealing to binding moral foundations, such as purity and sanctity, was also among the most effective interventions, showing positive effects even among participants identifying as Republicans. These findings provide critical insights to policymakers and practitioners aiming to galvanize the public behind collective action and advocacy on climate change with affordable and scalable interventions.

Experiments are sometimes viewed as being too limited to provide input into policy. Contrary to this perspective, we document diverse ways in which experimental findings have influenced environmental and natural resource policy decisions. We show how experiments have informed or changed the designs of emissions trading programs, conservation auctions, pro-environmental initiatives directed at households, and regulatory enforcement and compliance schemes. Experiments have also produced nonmarket demand estimates that have informed government regulatory analyses. We highlight the context and conditions that produced these experiment-policy links and offer insights into how researchers can better engage with the policy-making process and increase the impact of experimental research on policy.

Older adults are known to share more political misinformation than younger adults, but the nature of this tendency remains unclear. Using signal detection theory, this research examines two explanations for older adults' greater political misinformation sharing: (a) Age reduces people's ability to discriminate true from false information, leading older people to share more misinformation, and (b) older people exhibit stronger partisan sharing, preferring to share information that is congruent with their political ingroup rather than the outgroup. Two exploratory studies around the 2022 presidential elections in Brazil and midterm elections in the United States (NBrazil = 697; NU.S. = 1,716) support the partisan congruence explanation. Age does not robustly predict discernment between true versus false information in sharing intentions or accuracy judgments. Instead, age predicts partisan biases in sharing political news and judging its accuracy, and these effects remain after controlling for income and education. The effects of age in predicting partisan information sharing are not statistically mediated by measures of cognitive reflection, need for cognition, or faith in intuition. These results suggest that older adults engage in more partisan information assessment and sharing behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Societal challenges like climate change and COVID-19 can be interrelated. The present research examines collectivism as a cultural value that is associated with the tendency to perceive such important interconnectedness. We further examine whether collectivism predicts perceiving interconnectedness specifically for scientifically valid relationships, or generally, regardless of their validity. Using an international sample (Study 1; N = 12,955) and another large U.S. sample (Study 2; N = 1006), we found that more collectivistic individuals perceive stronger interconnectedness between climate change and pandemics. However, collectivistic individuals also perceived stronger interconnectedness even for scientifically invalid ones, such as between the discovery of new constellations among stars and the emergence of new viruses. Exploratory analyses examined political orientation as a potential moderator, but the results were inconsistent, highlighting the need for more systematic future research. Together, these findings suggest that collectivistic individuals do not selectively perceive valid interconnectedness, but they tend to perceive stronger interrelations among phenomena in general, whether true or not, which presents both opportunities and challenges for addressing environmental and other social issues confronting humans today.

Consumers often confront offerings that are associated with political cues. For example, a coffee company may tout its liberal relations with employees or suppliers, or may hang bathroom signs that promise to please liberals. In this research, we demonstrate that consumers overestimate how much these partisan cues influence others’ preferences, a pattern we term exaggerated preference polarization. We demonstrate exaggerated preference polarization in five studies, and show that it is robust across a variety of common consumption scenarios. While prior research demonstrates that people often overestimate others’ partisanship, the present research demonstrates that people overestimate the influence of partisan cues on other consumers’ preferences. This research contributes to the literature by identifying a novel way in which political polarization influences consumption behavior, especially for interpersonal decision making. This work also has important implications for firms, who should recognize that people will be more responsive to political signals when choosing for others. We discuss further contributions and directions for future research in the general discussion.

Abstract This chapter reviews the development of the field of judgment and decision-making (JDM), paralleling its emergence with the growing field of evolutionary psychology. JDM work has historically focused on a narrow range of research topics with restricted theoretical models and few applications to daily social life. This chapter argues for enriching the field by incorporating principles aimed at developing a holistic theory of social JDM that complements current research designed to refute rational blank-slate theories. Evolutionary psychology, which posits that human psychological processes are adapted to ancestral environments by natural selection, can provide a framework through which to accomplish this, and social cognition can inspire fruitful domains to focus research. This review summarizes the major themes of JDM, outlines a path forward for social JDM with natural selection as a unifying theory and attentional processes as a foundation for theoretical development, and issues a call to emphasize ecological design.

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 beneficial they perceived them to be, contributing to their support. These results suggest that perceived naturalness, and associated risks and benefits, could be an important factor in shaping public support for or opposition to new proteins. These findings have theoretical and broader implications for the development and adoption of sustainability technologies.

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. Recent US climate bills mark a major step in domestic climate actions, while their successful implementation relies on strong assumptions. This Perspective discusses potential challenges regarding supply, consumer demand and political polarization and how insights of social science could help to overcome these challenges.

This research demonstrates that people distance themselves not just from out-group partisans or policies but also from completely neutral and apolitical consumer products that have been "contaminated" simply by being preferred by the political out-group. Using large representative samples of Swedish adults, we investigated how aesthetic judgments of clothes (Study 1), evaluations of chocolate bars (Study 2), and allocations to charitable organizations (Study 3) were influenced by a randomly assigned association between these products and the leader or supporters of the participant's least- or most-liked political party. Products liked by the least-liked party became less attractive in all studies; the results were mixed for products liked by the most-liked party. Study 4 found that the presence of in-group-observers increased distancing from products liked by the least-liked party, indicating that self-presentational concerns bolster political distancing. These results suggest that affective political polarization influences our lives more subtly and profoundly than previously known.

Academic Abstract Humans frequently engage in mental time travel, reflecting on the past and anticipating the future. Although these processes may seem similar, research documents systematic differences between retrospection and prospection. We propose a conceptual framework to organize and explain these differences based on three axiomatic temporal asymmetries: The past occurs before the future; the past is more certain than the future; and the past is less controllable than the future. People’s experience with these axiomatic differences is internalized and overgeneralized to shape mental representations of the past and future. Our review shows that people generally prioritize prospection over retrospection, attending more to the future than the past and reacting more intensely to future events than to past events. We consider potential moderators of and constraints on the generality of prioritizing prospection. We explore the implications of these temporal asymmetries, emphasizing their theoretical and practical significance. Public Abstract While daily life centers on the present, people often reflect on the past and anticipate the future. But which direction of mental time travel—backward or forward—has more influence? We identify three key differences that shape how people engage with the past and future: time flows from past to future, the future is more uncertain, and people have more control over the future. These differences affect the frequency, intensity, and nature of thoughts and feelings, leading to predictable biases in how we mentally represent and emotionally engage with events over time. Because focusing on the future often provides greater benefits, people tend to prioritize prospection over retrospection in everyday life.

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 be amplified or diminished. We also describe how the media environment can amplify or diminish the roles of the public and the politicians in influencing each other. As the world confronts the climate crisis, research from social psychologists, environmental psychologists, political scientists, and communication scholars has examined the interrelations between the public, politicians, media, and activists, but largely in a disconnected way. The current paper provides a social psychological framework to integrate these approaches and, in so doing, suggest new directions for research and theory-guided ways to influence policy around climate change.

This study examines the relationship between respondents’ vaccine hesitancy, reported media consumption patterns, ideological leanings, and trust in science. A large-scale survey conducted in the US in 2022 (N = 1,646) assessed self-reported COVID-19 vaccination, trust in science, and reported media consumption. Findings show that, regardless of personal ideology, individuals who consumed less conservative media and had a more ideologically diverse media diet were more likely to be fully vaccinated and boosted. Additionally, consuming more conservative media was negatively associated with trust in science, but this relationship was weaker among those with a more ideologically diverse media diet. By incorporating data from an earlier wave of the survey in the summer of 2020, before COVID-19 vaccines were available, we found that a less conservative and more ideologically diverse media diet in 2022 predicted vaccination behavior in 2022, controlling for prior vaccine intentions and media consumption in 2020. A similar survey conducted in the UK in the summer of 2020 paralleled patterns in the US regarding vaccine intentions and media consumption. These results suggest that an ideologically diverse media diet is associated with reduced vaccine hesitancy. Public health initiatives might benefit from encouraging ideologically diverse media consumption.

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 U.S. 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 bundling thus risks decreasing public support for decarbonization policies by alienating one ideological side of the electorate without gaining support from the other side. This risk exists even when policy bundling reduces polarization.

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 be amplified or diminished. We also describe how the media environment can amplify or diminish the roles of the public and the politicians in influencing each other. As the world confronts the climate crisis, research from social psychologists, environmental psychologists, political scientists, and communication scholars has examined the interrelations between the public, politicians, media, and activists, but largely in a disconnected way. The current paper provides a social psychological framework to integrate these approaches and, in so doing, suggest new directions for research and theory-guided ways to influence policy around climate change.

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 people align their policy stances to political elites from their own parties. People also trusted experts and ingroup political leaders more than they did outgroup political leaders. Partly because of this polarized trust, policies from experts and bipartisan groups were more widely supported than policies from ingroup political leaders. These results illustrate the potentially detrimental role political leaders may play and the potential for effective leadership by bipartisan groups and nonpartisan experts in shaping public policy attitudes during crises.