blog posts

• What behavioral strategies motivate environmental action?

  Jun 10, 2025 9:00 am

  Source: University of Pennsylvania, 5/13/25

  Survey data show that most people believe climate change is happening, but many don’t act, and as a postdoctoral fellow in Annenberg School for Communication Professor Emily Falk’s Communication Neuroscience Lab, Alyssa (Allie) Sinclair has thought a lot about why that might be. Building off health behavior studies and other literature in psychology, neuroscience, and communication, Sinclair led an interdisciplinary team of researchers examining how to overcome these barriers to climate action. In an “intervention tournament” with 7,624 U.S. adults, Penn researchers including Sinclair, Falk, and Mann tested 17 interventions targeting the themes of relevance, future thinking, and response efficacy to see which were most effective for motivating action. Their findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

• How to break through climate apathy

  Jun 6, 2025 9:00 am

  Source: UCLA, 4/24/25

  A new study finds that presenting the same continuous climate data, such as incremental changes in temperature, in binary form -- such as whether a lake did or did not freeze in the winter -- significantly increases people's ability to see the impact of climate change.

• Personality traits shape our prosocial behavior

  Jun 3, 2025 9:00 am

  Source: University of Zurich, 4/28/25

  Why do some people do more for the community than others? A new study now shows that personality traits such as extraversion and agreeableness correlate with volunteering and charitable giving.

• Climate Connection: Libraries host climate cafés to help patrons process feelings about a changing world

  Mar 3, 2025 3:00 pm

  Source: American Libraries, 3/3/25

  The Kansas City Public Library and a local non-profit organization began facilitating virtual climate cafés to help communities express their anxieties about climate change and connect with like-minded individuals without the pressure to turn sessions into activism.