People-watching and the environment: Looking for signs of hope while concern outpaces action.

The social landscape of climate change is shifting. As more people acknowledge the urgency of the problem and society's underwhelming response to it, climate despair threatens to become a major contributor to personal inaction. At this moment, people need a reason for hope. Recent research shows that climate hope, where it exists, is largely social: People feel hopeful when they see others taking action. 'People-watching' is therefore critical. But capitalizing on social proof is tricky as long as concern outpaces action. Other recent research elegantly responds to this conundrum by advertising improvements in social norms, setting people up to find cause for hope even when action is low. We close by nominating other possible social paths to increased hope.

Lives versus Livelihoods? Perceived economic risk has a stronger association with support for COVID-19 preventive measures than perceived health risk.

This paper examines whether compliance with COVID-19 mitigation measures is motivated by wanting to save lives or save the economy (or both), and which implications this carries to fight the pandemic. National representative samples were collected from 24 countries (N = 25,435). The main predictors were (1) perceived risk to contract coronavirus, (2) perceived risk to suffer economic losses due to coronavirus, and (3) their interaction effect. Individual and country-level variables were added as covariates in multilevel regression models. We examined compliance with various preventive health behaviors and support for strict containment policies. Results show that perceived economic risk consistently predicted mitigation behavior and policy support-and its effects were positive. Perceived health risk had mixed effects. Only two significant interactions between health and economic risk were identified-both positive.