Abstract Using survey data, the authors developed an architecture of climate change beliefs in No... more Abstract Using survey data, the authors developed an architecture of climate change beliefs in Norway and their correlation with support for policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. A strong majority of respondents believe that anthropogenic climate change is occurring and identify carbon dioxide emissions as a cause. Regression analysis shows that respondents recognize the effectiveness of direct actions that require difficult trade-offs, such as imposing a carbon tax. Yet, their voting intentions suggest a preference for policies that ...
Some past events incite more wonder about their causes than do others. For example, negative even... more Some past events incite more wonder about their causes than do others. For example, negative events require explanation more than positive events. We review social psychologists' theoretical and empirical insights on what kinds of past events " beg explanation. " We draw on attribution theory that became popular among psychologists from the 1960s onward, on research on counterfactual reasoning, and on conversational and discursive critiques of attribution theory. We argue that factors predicting what is or is not perceived as requiring explanation are culturally and historically grounded, and that accordingly, what begs explanation varies between contexts and can change over time. Yet, drawing on the distinction between content and process, we argue that there are recognizable patterns across time and space. Specifically, we propose the relationship between events and background expectations as a rather stable predictor of what begs explanation—and as a level of analysis that can unite seemingly disparate approaches.
Events are temporal ''figures " , which can be defined as identifiable segments in time, bounded ... more Events are temporal ''figures " , which can be defined as identifiable segments in time, bounded by beginnings and endings. But the functions and importance of these two boundaries differ. We argue that beginnings loom larger than endings by attracting more attention, being judged as more important and interesting, warranting more explanation, and having more causal power. This difference follows from a lay notion that additions (the introduction of something new) imply more change and demand more effort than do subtractions (returning to a previous state of affairs). This ''beginning advantage " is demonstrated in eight studies of people's representations of epochs and events on a historical timeline as well as in cyclical change in the annual seasons. People think it is more important to know when wars and reigns started than when they ended, and are more interested in reading about beginnings than endings of historical movements. Transitional events (such as elections and passages from one season to the next) claim more interest and grow in importance when framed as beginnings of what follows than as conclusions of what came before. As beginnings are often identified in retrospect, the beginning advantage may distort and exaggerate their actual historical importance.
This study investigated relations between consumers’ sustainable development self-efficacy, attit... more This study investigated relations between consumers’ sustainable development self-efficacy, attitudes, norms and intentions to purchase sustainable groceries such as ecological and fair trade foods. Demographic variables were also investigated. Attitudes and norms were positively associated with intentions to purchase sustainable products. The importance of different types of attitudes and norms for explaining sustainable consumption depended on the facet of purchasing intentions that was investigated. Self-efficacy explained variance in purchasing intentions over and above attitudes, norms and demographic characteristics. Of the self-efficacy components, people’s perceptions of their indirect impact gained by encouraging others to contribute to sustainable development showed the strongest association with purchasing intentions. This could mean that believing that one can have an impact on other consumers is a strong motivator for buying sustainable products. Implications of these findings for practitioners and environmental policy are discussed.
Few comparative international studies describe the climate change policies people are willing to ... more Few comparative international studies describe the climate change policies people are willing to support and the reasons for their support of different policies. Using survey data from 664 economics and business undergraduates in Austria, Bangladesh, Finland, Germany, Norway, and the United States, we explore how perceived risk characteristics and mental models of climate change influence support for policy alternatives. General green policies such as funding research on renewable technologies and planting trees were the overwhelmingly most popular policy alternatives. Around half the students support carbon reduction policies such as requiring higher car fuel efficiency and increasing taxes on fossil fuels. Least popular were engineering alternatives such as fertilizing the oceans and replacing fossil fuels with nuclear power. Variations among nations are generally small. Support for different policy alternatives corresponds with different causal thinking. Those who hold a pollution model of the causes of climate change, tend to blame environmental harms (e.g., air pollution from toxic chemicals), see general green policy alternatives as effective, and support general green policies. Support of carbon reduction strategies is associated with seeing carbon emissions as the cause and reducing carbon emissions as effective solutions. Support of engineering solutions increases with identifying volcanoes among causes and regarding engineering solutions as effective. Although these international students agree that climate change is a threatening problem, their causal thinking correlates with support for different mitigative policy actions, with the most popular ones not necessarily the most effective.
This paper addresses the role of affect and emotions in shaping the behavior of responders in the... more This paper addresses the role of affect and emotions in shaping the behavior of responders in the ultimatum game. A huge amount of research shows that players do not behave in an economically rational way in the ultimatum game, and emotional mechanisms have been proposed as a possible explanation. In particular, feelings of fairness, anger and envy are likely candidates
Affective forecasting with respect to two environmental risks (ozone depletion, air pollution) wa... more Affective forecasting with respect to two environmental risks (ozone depletion, air pollution) was investigated by studying tourists who travelled to either Australia or Bangkok and were thus confronted with one of these risks. We measured anticipated outcome and anticipated emotions before the journey, actually experienced outcome and actually experienced emotions during the journey, and anticipated outcome and emotions concerning a
This paper addresses the role of affect and emotions in shaping the behavior of responders in the... more This paper addresses the role of affect and emotions in shaping the behavior of responders in the ultimatum game. A huge amount of research shows that players do not behave in an economically rational way in the ultimatum game, and emotional mechanisms have been proposed as a possible explanation. In particular, feelings of fairness, anger and envy are likely candidates as affective determinants. We introduce a three-player ultimatum game with three-options, which permits the responder to either penalize the proposer or to penalize a third party by rejecting offers. This allows for partially distinguishing rejections due to a retaliation motive driven by anger towards the proposer from rejections due to inequity aversion driven by feelings of envy towards a third party. Results from two experiments suggest that responders experience feelings of dissatisfaction and unfairness if their share is small in comparison to the proposer's share; anger, then, may trigger rejections towards the proposer. Responders also experience dissatisfaction and envy when third party shares exceed their own shares; however, in contrast to anger, envy does not trigger rejections and is dissociated from the decision to accept or reject an offer. We conclude that acting upon anger is socially acceptable, whereas envy is not acceptable as a reason for action. Furthermore, we find that responders generally feel better after rejections, suggesting that rejections serve to regulate one's affective state.
A theoretical model is proposed that specifies lay causal theories of behavior; and supporting ex... more A theoretical model is proposed that specifies lay causal theories of behavior; and supporting experimental evidence is presented. The model's basic assumption is that different types of behavior trigger different hypotheses concerning the types of causes that may have brought about the behavior. Seven categories are distinguished that are assumed to serve as both behavior types and explanation types: goals, dispositions, temporary states such as emotions, intentional actions, outcomes, events, and stimulus attributes. The model specifies inference rules that lay people use when explaining behavior (actions are caused by goals; goals are caused by higher order goals or temporary states; temporary states are caused by dispositions, stimulus attributes, or events; outcomes are caused by actions, temporary states, dispositions, stimulus attributes, or events; events are caused by dispositions or preceding events). Two experiments are reported. Experiment 1 showed that free-response...
The present study investigates the role of anticipated concrete emotions in preferential decision... more The present study investigates the role of anticipated concrete emotions in preferential decision making. Concrete emotions are conceptualized as a special set of attributes in a multi-attribute utility framework.
Emergent properties of global political culture were examined using data from the World History S... more Emergent properties of global political culture were examined using data from the World History Survey (WHS) involving 6,902 university students in 37 countries evaluating 40 figures from world history. Multidimensional scaling and factor analysis techniques found only limited forms of universality in evaluations across Western, Catholic/Orthodox, Muslim, and Asian country clusters. The highest consensus across cultures involved scientific innovators, with Einstein having the most positive evaluation overall. Peaceful humanitarians like Mother Theresa and Gandhi followed. There was much less cross-cultural consistency in the evaluation of negative figures, led by Hitler, Osama bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein. After more traditional empirical methods (e.g., factor analysis) failed to identify meaningful cross-cultural patterns, Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) was used to identify four global representational profiles: Secular and Religious Idealists were overwhelmingly prevalent in Christian countries, and Political Realists were common in Muslim and Asian countries. We discuss possible consequences and interpretations of these different representational profiles.
ABSTRACT Social marketing studies suggest that targeting segments of the population, by assessing... more ABSTRACT Social marketing studies suggest that targeting segments of the population, by assessing and addressing their values and motives for actions in the design of communications, can improve the effectiveness of health and environmental communications efforts. Guidance for climate change communication now routinely proposes targeting specific audience segments as a fundamental principle, despite ambiguity regarding what specific behaviors to target and a lack of empirical evidence for specific strategies. Audience segmentation strategies proposed to date for climate change communications resemble those used in other social marketing efforts, but can be proprietary or opaque, with little data on the effects of implementing them. Insufficient evidence exists to systematically demonstrate the effectiveness of targeting or tailoring climate change communications per se, other than by reference to related research on health and environmental risk communications. Meta-analyses with systematic literature reviews, however, demonstrate that health risk communications can be more effective at changing attitudes and behaviors if they are tailored to the individual recipients' beliefs about their self-efficacy. The advent of technology-enabled microtargeting is rapidly expanding the opportunities for tailoring and targeting climate change communications and for adding to what we know from using them to make them effective. WIREs Clim Change 2013, 4:447–455. doi: 10.1002/wcc.214 Conflict of interest: The authors have declared no conflicts of interest for this article. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.
Abstract Using survey data, the authors developed an architecture of climate change beliefs in No... more Abstract Using survey data, the authors developed an architecture of climate change beliefs in Norway and their correlation with support for policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. A strong majority of respondents believe that anthropogenic climate change is occurring and identify carbon dioxide emissions as a cause. Regression analysis shows that respondents recognize the effectiveness of direct actions that require difficult trade-offs, such as imposing a carbon tax. Yet, their voting intentions suggest a preference for policies that ...
Some past events incite more wonder about their causes than do others. For example, negative even... more Some past events incite more wonder about their causes than do others. For example, negative events require explanation more than positive events. We review social psychologists' theoretical and empirical insights on what kinds of past events " beg explanation. " We draw on attribution theory that became popular among psychologists from the 1960s onward, on research on counterfactual reasoning, and on conversational and discursive critiques of attribution theory. We argue that factors predicting what is or is not perceived as requiring explanation are culturally and historically grounded, and that accordingly, what begs explanation varies between contexts and can change over time. Yet, drawing on the distinction between content and process, we argue that there are recognizable patterns across time and space. Specifically, we propose the relationship between events and background expectations as a rather stable predictor of what begs explanation—and as a level of analysis that can unite seemingly disparate approaches.
Events are temporal ''figures " , which can be defined as identifiable segments in time, bounded ... more Events are temporal ''figures " , which can be defined as identifiable segments in time, bounded by beginnings and endings. But the functions and importance of these two boundaries differ. We argue that beginnings loom larger than endings by attracting more attention, being judged as more important and interesting, warranting more explanation, and having more causal power. This difference follows from a lay notion that additions (the introduction of something new) imply more change and demand more effort than do subtractions (returning to a previous state of affairs). This ''beginning advantage " is demonstrated in eight studies of people's representations of epochs and events on a historical timeline as well as in cyclical change in the annual seasons. People think it is more important to know when wars and reigns started than when they ended, and are more interested in reading about beginnings than endings of historical movements. Transitional events (such as elections and passages from one season to the next) claim more interest and grow in importance when framed as beginnings of what follows than as conclusions of what came before. As beginnings are often identified in retrospect, the beginning advantage may distort and exaggerate their actual historical importance.
This study investigated relations between consumers’ sustainable development self-efficacy, attit... more This study investigated relations between consumers’ sustainable development self-efficacy, attitudes, norms and intentions to purchase sustainable groceries such as ecological and fair trade foods. Demographic variables were also investigated. Attitudes and norms were positively associated with intentions to purchase sustainable products. The importance of different types of attitudes and norms for explaining sustainable consumption depended on the facet of purchasing intentions that was investigated. Self-efficacy explained variance in purchasing intentions over and above attitudes, norms and demographic characteristics. Of the self-efficacy components, people’s perceptions of their indirect impact gained by encouraging others to contribute to sustainable development showed the strongest association with purchasing intentions. This could mean that believing that one can have an impact on other consumers is a strong motivator for buying sustainable products. Implications of these findings for practitioners and environmental policy are discussed.
Few comparative international studies describe the climate change policies people are willing to ... more Few comparative international studies describe the climate change policies people are willing to support and the reasons for their support of different policies. Using survey data from 664 economics and business undergraduates in Austria, Bangladesh, Finland, Germany, Norway, and the United States, we explore how perceived risk characteristics and mental models of climate change influence support for policy alternatives. General green policies such as funding research on renewable technologies and planting trees were the overwhelmingly most popular policy alternatives. Around half the students support carbon reduction policies such as requiring higher car fuel efficiency and increasing taxes on fossil fuels. Least popular were engineering alternatives such as fertilizing the oceans and replacing fossil fuels with nuclear power. Variations among nations are generally small. Support for different policy alternatives corresponds with different causal thinking. Those who hold a pollution model of the causes of climate change, tend to blame environmental harms (e.g., air pollution from toxic chemicals), see general green policy alternatives as effective, and support general green policies. Support of carbon reduction strategies is associated with seeing carbon emissions as the cause and reducing carbon emissions as effective solutions. Support of engineering solutions increases with identifying volcanoes among causes and regarding engineering solutions as effective. Although these international students agree that climate change is a threatening problem, their causal thinking correlates with support for different mitigative policy actions, with the most popular ones not necessarily the most effective.
This paper addresses the role of affect and emotions in shaping the behavior of responders in the... more This paper addresses the role of affect and emotions in shaping the behavior of responders in the ultimatum game. A huge amount of research shows that players do not behave in an economically rational way in the ultimatum game, and emotional mechanisms have been proposed as a possible explanation. In particular, feelings of fairness, anger and envy are likely candidates
Affective forecasting with respect to two environmental risks (ozone depletion, air pollution) wa... more Affective forecasting with respect to two environmental risks (ozone depletion, air pollution) was investigated by studying tourists who travelled to either Australia or Bangkok and were thus confronted with one of these risks. We measured anticipated outcome and anticipated emotions before the journey, actually experienced outcome and actually experienced emotions during the journey, and anticipated outcome and emotions concerning a
This paper addresses the role of affect and emotions in shaping the behavior of responders in the... more This paper addresses the role of affect and emotions in shaping the behavior of responders in the ultimatum game. A huge amount of research shows that players do not behave in an economically rational way in the ultimatum game, and emotional mechanisms have been proposed as a possible explanation. In particular, feelings of fairness, anger and envy are likely candidates as affective determinants. We introduce a three-player ultimatum game with three-options, which permits the responder to either penalize the proposer or to penalize a third party by rejecting offers. This allows for partially distinguishing rejections due to a retaliation motive driven by anger towards the proposer from rejections due to inequity aversion driven by feelings of envy towards a third party. Results from two experiments suggest that responders experience feelings of dissatisfaction and unfairness if their share is small in comparison to the proposer's share; anger, then, may trigger rejections towards the proposer. Responders also experience dissatisfaction and envy when third party shares exceed their own shares; however, in contrast to anger, envy does not trigger rejections and is dissociated from the decision to accept or reject an offer. We conclude that acting upon anger is socially acceptable, whereas envy is not acceptable as a reason for action. Furthermore, we find that responders generally feel better after rejections, suggesting that rejections serve to regulate one's affective state.
A theoretical model is proposed that specifies lay causal theories of behavior; and supporting ex... more A theoretical model is proposed that specifies lay causal theories of behavior; and supporting experimental evidence is presented. The model's basic assumption is that different types of behavior trigger different hypotheses concerning the types of causes that may have brought about the behavior. Seven categories are distinguished that are assumed to serve as both behavior types and explanation types: goals, dispositions, temporary states such as emotions, intentional actions, outcomes, events, and stimulus attributes. The model specifies inference rules that lay people use when explaining behavior (actions are caused by goals; goals are caused by higher order goals or temporary states; temporary states are caused by dispositions, stimulus attributes, or events; outcomes are caused by actions, temporary states, dispositions, stimulus attributes, or events; events are caused by dispositions or preceding events). Two experiments are reported. Experiment 1 showed that free-response...
The present study investigates the role of anticipated concrete emotions in preferential decision... more The present study investigates the role of anticipated concrete emotions in preferential decision making. Concrete emotions are conceptualized as a special set of attributes in a multi-attribute utility framework.
Emergent properties of global political culture were examined using data from the World History S... more Emergent properties of global political culture were examined using data from the World History Survey (WHS) involving 6,902 university students in 37 countries evaluating 40 figures from world history. Multidimensional scaling and factor analysis techniques found only limited forms of universality in evaluations across Western, Catholic/Orthodox, Muslim, and Asian country clusters. The highest consensus across cultures involved scientific innovators, with Einstein having the most positive evaluation overall. Peaceful humanitarians like Mother Theresa and Gandhi followed. There was much less cross-cultural consistency in the evaluation of negative figures, led by Hitler, Osama bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein. After more traditional empirical methods (e.g., factor analysis) failed to identify meaningful cross-cultural patterns, Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) was used to identify four global representational profiles: Secular and Religious Idealists were overwhelmingly prevalent in Christian countries, and Political Realists were common in Muslim and Asian countries. We discuss possible consequences and interpretations of these different representational profiles.
ABSTRACT Social marketing studies suggest that targeting segments of the population, by assessing... more ABSTRACT Social marketing studies suggest that targeting segments of the population, by assessing and addressing their values and motives for actions in the design of communications, can improve the effectiveness of health and environmental communications efforts. Guidance for climate change communication now routinely proposes targeting specific audience segments as a fundamental principle, despite ambiguity regarding what specific behaviors to target and a lack of empirical evidence for specific strategies. Audience segmentation strategies proposed to date for climate change communications resemble those used in other social marketing efforts, but can be proprietary or opaque, with little data on the effects of implementing them. Insufficient evidence exists to systematically demonstrate the effectiveness of targeting or tailoring climate change communications per se, other than by reference to related research on health and environmental risk communications. Meta-analyses with systematic literature reviews, however, demonstrate that health risk communications can be more effective at changing attitudes and behaviors if they are tailored to the individual recipients' beliefs about their self-efficacy. The advent of technology-enabled microtargeting is rapidly expanding the opportunities for tailoring and targeting climate change communications and for adding to what we know from using them to make them effective. WIREs Clim Change 2013, 4:447–455. doi: 10.1002/wcc.214 Conflict of interest: The authors have declared no conflicts of interest for this article. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.
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