Planning: CRISES: Social and Behavioral Aspects of Climate Change

Northwestern University, Evanston IL

Investigators

Abstract

Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges facing humanity today. The solutions to climate change will involve changing how people think about and behave in relation to their environment. The proposed work is to plan for the creation of an interdisciplinary center that would bring together researchers from a variety of disciplines, including psychology, sociology, and environmental science, to study the social and behavioral aspects of climate change. The work will focus on issues such as how people receive, process, and remember information about climate change; the factors that influence pro-environmental beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors; and how cultural values shape people’s understanding of climate change. The center’s findings will contribute to the development of more effective ways to communicate about climate change and encourage people to take action to address this crisis. The planning process will involve several meetings of experts from each of the constituent disciplines. The team will consider the use of a variety of different methods to shed light on the behavioral, cognitive, and social dimensions of climate change. These methods include large-scale Internet studies of the relationship between personality and the effects of local climate experiences, experiments with a variety of participants that will reveal whether and when people are resistant or receptive to information about climate change, and studies of how maps and other visual representations affect people’s understanding of climate change. The planning process will result in the development of plans for a future center that will develop more effective ways to communicate about climate change and encourage people to take action to address this challenge. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.