Create a culture of experiments in environmental programs.

Organizations need a better "learning by doing" approach.

Social norms explain prioritization of climate policy.

Most people in the United States recognize the reality of climate change and are concerned about its consequences, yet climate change is a low priority relative to other policy issues. Recognizing that belief in climate change does not necessarily translate to prioritizing climate policy, we examine psychological factors that may boost or inhibit prioritization. We hypothesized that perceived social norms from people's own political party influence their climate policy prioritization beyond their personal belief in climate change. In Study 1, a large, diverse sample of Democratic and Republican participants (N = 887) reported their prioritization of climate policy relative to other issues. Participants' perceptions of their political ingroup's social norms about climate policy prioritization were the strongest predictor of personal climate policy prioritization-stronger even than participants' belief in climate change, political orientation, environmental identity, and environmental values. Perceptions of political outgroup norms did not predict prioritization. In Study 2 (N = 217), we experimentally manipulated Democratic and Republican descriptive norms of climate policy prioritization. Participants' prioritization of climate policy was highest when both the political ingroup and the outgroup prioritized climate policy. Ingroup norms had a strong influence on personal policy prioritization whereas outgroup norms did not. These findings demonstrate that, beyond personal beliefs and other individual differences, ingroup social norms shape the public's prioritization of climate change as a policy issue. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10584-022-03396-x.

Politicians polarize and experts depolarize public support for COVID-19 management policies across countries.

Political polarization impeded public support for policies to reduce the spread of COVID-19, much as polarization hinders responses to other contemporary challenges. Unlike previous theory and research that focused on the United States, the present research examined the effects of political elite cues and affective polarization on support for policies to manage the COVID-19 pandemic in seven countries (n = 12,955): Brazil, Israel, Italy, South Korea, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Across countries, cues from political elites polarized public attitudes toward COVID-19 policies. Liberal and conservative respondents supported policies proposed by ingroup politicians and parties more than the same policies from outgroup politicians and parties. Respondents disliked, distrusted, and felt cold toward outgroup political elites, whereas they liked, trusted, and felt warm toward both ingroup political elites and nonpartisan experts. This affective polarization was correlated with policy support. These findings imply that policies from bipartisan coalitions and nonpartisan experts would be less polarizing, enjoying broader public support. Indeed, across countries, policies from bipartisan coalitions and experts were more widely supported. A follow-up experiment replicated these findings among US respondents considering international vaccine distribution policies. The polarizing effects of partisan elites and affective polarization emerged across nations that vary in cultures, ideologies, and political systems. Contrary to some propositions, the United States was not exceptionally polarized. Rather, these results suggest that polarizing processes emerged simply from categorizing people into political ingroups and outgroups. Political elites drive polarization globally, but nonpartisan experts can help resolve the conflicts that arise from it.

False polarization: Cognitive mechanisms and potential solutions.

Although political polarization in the United States is real, intense, and increasing, partisans consistently overestimate its magnitude. This 'false polarization' is insidious because it reinforces actual polarization and inhibits compromise. We review empirical research on false polarization and the related phenomenon of negative meta-perceptions, and we propose three cognitive and affective processes that likely contribute to these phenomena: categorical thinking, oversimplification, and emotional amplification. Finally, we review several interventions that have shown promise in mitigating these biases.

Structured reflection increases intentions to reduce other people's health risks during COVID-19.

People believe they should consider how their behavior might negatively impact other people, Yet their behavior often increases others' health risks. This creates challenges for managing public health crises like the COVID-19 pandemic. We examined a procedure wherein people reflect on their personal criteria regarding how their behavior impacts others' health risks. We expected structured reflection to increase people's intentions and decisions to reduce others' health risks. Structured reflection increases attention to others' health risks and the correspondence between people's personal criteria and behavioral intentions. In four experiments during COVID-19, people (N  = 12,995) reported their personal criteria about how much specific attributes, including the impact on others' health risks, should influence their behavior. Compared with control conditions, people who engaged in structured reflection reported greater intentions to reduce business capacity (experiment 1) and avoid large social gatherings (experiments 2 and 3). They also donated more to provide vaccines to refugees (experiment 4). These effects emerged across seven countries that varied in collectivism and COVID-19 case rates (experiments 1 and 2). Structured reflection was distinct from instructions to carefully deliberate (experiment 3). Structured reflection increased the correlation between personal criteria and behavioral intentions (experiments 1 and 3). And structured reflection increased donations more among people who scored lower in cognitive reflection compared with those who scored higher in cognitive reflection (experiment 4). These findings suggest that structured reflection can effectively increase behaviors to reduce public health risks.

When election expectations fail: Polarized perceptions of election legitimacy increase with accumulating evidence of election outcomes and with polarized media.

The present study, conducted immediately after the 2020 presidential election in the United States, examined whether Democrats' and Republicans' polarized assessments of election legitimacy increased over time. In a naturalistic survey experiment, people (N = 1,236) were randomly surveyed either during the week following Election Day, with votes cast but the outcome unknown, or during the following week, after President Joseph Biden was widely declared the winner. The design unconfounded the election outcome announcement from the vote itself, allowing more precise testing of predictions derived from cognitive dissonance theory. As predicted, perceived election legitimacy increased among Democrats, from the first to the second week following Election Day, as their expected Biden win was confirmed, whereas perceived election legitimacy decreased among Republicans as their expected President Trump win was disconfirmed. From the first to the second week following Election Day, Republicans reported stronger negative emotions and weaker positive emotions while Democrats reported stronger positive emotions and weaker negative emotions. The polarized perceptions of election legitimacy were correlated with the tendencies to trust and consume polarized media. Consumption of Fox News was associated with lowered perceptions of election legitimacy over time whereas consumption of other outlets was associated with higher perceptions of election legitimacy over time. Discussion centers on the role of the media in the experience of cognitive dissonance and the implications of polarized perceptions of election legitimacy for psychology, political science, and the future of democratic society.

Attention increases environmental risk perception.

The authors suggest that mere attention increases the perceived severity of environmental risks because attention increases the fear and distinctiveness of attended risks. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were exposed to images of multiple environmental risks, with attention repeatedly oriented to a subset of these risks. Participants subsequently perceived attended risks to be more severe, more frightening, higher priority, and more distinctive than control risks. In Experiments 3 and 4, spatial cueing manipulations were used to briefly draw attention toward some risks and away from others. In Experiment 3, a briefly flashed rectangle drew attention toward one side of a computer screen just before 2 images depicting different risks appeared: 1 image near to where the rectangle appeared and 1 further away. In Experiment 4, incidental attention was cued toward some risks by giving participants an unrelated letter search task that required them to briefly attend near that location. Participants in Experiments 3 and 4 selected cued (attended) risks as more severe, distinctive, and frightening than noncued risks. Across experiments, serial mediation analyses indicated that the effect of the attention manipulation on severity was mediated by the effect of attention on fear which was mediated by distinctiveness. Across experiments, we equated duration of exposure to risks and sought to minimize demand characteristics. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Behavioural frameworks to understand public perceptions of and risk response to carbon dioxide removal.

The adoption of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies at a scale sufficient to draw down carbon emissions will require both individual and collective decisions that happen over time in different locations to enable a massive scale-up. Members of the public and other decision-makers have not yet formed strong attitudes, beliefs and preferences about most of the individual CDR technologies or taken positions on policy mechanisms and tax-payer support for CDR. Much of the current discourse among scientists, policy analysts and policy-makers about CDR implicitly assumes that decision-makers will exhibit unbiased, rational behaviour that weighs the costs and benefits of CDR. In this paper, we review behavioural decision theory and discuss how public reactions to CDR will be different from and more complex than that implied by rational choice theory. Given that people do not form attitudes and opinions in a vacuum, we outline how fundamental social normative principles shape important intergroup, intragroup and social network processes that influence support for or opposition to CDR technologies. We also point to key insights that may help stakeholders craft public outreach strategies that anticipate the nuances of how people evaluate the risks and benefits of CDR approaches. Finally, we outline critical research questions to understand the behavioural components of CDR to plan for an emerging public response.

Above and beyond the content: Feelings influence mental simulations.

Gilead et al. present a rich account of abstraction. Though the account describes several elements which influence mental representation, it is worth also delineating how feelings, such as fluency and emotion, influence mental simulation. Additionally, though past experience can sometimes make simulations more accurate and worthwhile (as Gilead et al. suggest), many systematic prediction errors persist despite substantial experience.

Salience theory of mere exposure: Relative exposure increases liking, extremity, and emotional intensity.

We propose and support a salience explanation of exposure effects. We suggest that repeated exposure to stimuli influences evaluations by increasing salience, the relative quality of standing out from other competing stimuli. In Experiments 1 and 2, we manipulated exposure, presenting some stimuli 9 times and other stimuli 3 times, 1 time, or 0 times, as in previous mere exposure research. Exposure increased liking, replicating previous research (Zajonc, 1968), and increased salience, made evaluations more extreme, and made stimuli more emotionally intense. Across experiments, results of multiple mediation models and a causal chain of experiments supported the idea that salience explains these exposure effects. Fluency and apprehension, 2 constructs that have been invoked to explain mere exposure, accounted for less of these effects according to the mediation models and the chain of experiments. We next manipulated relative exposure and absolute exposure orthogonally, finding that relative exposure increases liking more than absolute exposure. Stimuli presented 9 times were liked more when other stimuli in the context were presented less than 9 times than when the other stimuli were presented more than 9 times (Experiment 4). Whereas absolute exposure had no significant effect in Experiment 4, relative exposure increased liking, extremity, and emotional intensity. In Experiment 5, a direct manipulation of salience increased liking, evaluative extremity, and emotional intensity. These results suggest that salience partially explains effects previously attributed to absolute "mere" exposure. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Attention Drives Emotion: Voluntary Visual Attention Increases Perceived Emotional Intensity.

Attention and emotion are fundamental psychological systems. It is well established that emotion intensifies attention. Three experiments reported here (N = 235) demonstrated the reversed causal direction: Voluntary visual attention intensifies perceived emotion. In Experiment 1, participants repeatedly directed attention toward a target object during sequential search. Participants subsequently perceived their emotional reactions to target objects as more intense than their reactions to control objects. Experiments 2 and 3 used a spatial-cuing procedure to manipulate voluntary visual attention. Spatially cued attention increased perceived emotional intensity. Participants perceived spatially cued objects as more emotionally intense than noncued objects even when participants were asked to mentally rehearse the name of noncued objects. This suggests that the intensifying effect of attention is independent of more extensive mental rehearsal. Across experiments, attended objects were perceived as more visually distinctive, which statistically mediated the effects of attention on emotional intensity.

It depends: Partisan evaluation of conditional probability importance.

Policies to suppress rare events such as terrorism often restrict co-occurring categories such as Muslim immigration. Evaluating restrictive policies requires clear thinking about conditional probabilities. For example, terrorism is extremely rare. So even if most terrorist immigrants are Muslim-a high "hit rate"-the inverse conditional probability of Muslim immigrants being terrorists is extremely low. Yet the inverse conditional probability is more relevant to evaluating restrictive policies such as the threat of terrorism if Muslim immigration were restricted. We suggest that people engage in partisan evaluation of conditional probabilities, judging hit rates as more important when they support politically prescribed restrictive policies. In two studies, supporters of expelling asylum seekers from Tel Aviv, Israel, of banning Muslim immigration and travel to the United States, and of banning assault weapons judged "hit rate" probabilities (e.g., that terrorists are Muslims) as more important than did policy opponents, who judged the inverse conditional probabilities (e.g., that Muslims are terrorists) as more important. These partisan differences spanned restrictive policies favored by Rightists and Republicans (expelling asylum seekers and banning Muslim travel) and by Democrats (banning assault weapons). Inviting partisans to adopt an unbiased expert's perspective partially reduced these partisan differences. In Study 2 (but not Study 1), partisan differences were larger among more numerate partisans, suggesting that numeracy supported motivated reasoning. These findings have implications for polarization, political judgment, and policy evaluation. Even when partisans agree about what the statistical facts are, they markedly disagree about the relevance of those statistical facts.

Psychological Barriers to Bipartisan Public Support for Climate Policy.

Psychological scientists have the expertise-and arguably an obligation-to help understand the political polarization that impedes enactment of climate policy. Many explanations emphasize Republican skepticism about climate change. Yet results from national panel studies in 2014 and 2016 indicate that most Republicans believe in climate change, if not as strongly as Democrats. Political polarization over climate policy does not simply reflect that Democrats and Republicans disagree about climate change but that Democrats and Republicans disagree with each other. The results of a national panel experiment and of in-depth interviews with four former members of Congress suggest that Democrats and Republicans-both ordinary citizens and policymakers-support policies from their own party and reactively devalue policies from the opposing party. These partisan evaluations occur both for policies historically associated with liberal principles and politicians (cap-and-trade) and for policies associated with conservative principles and politicians (revenue-neutral carbon tax). People also exaggerate how much other Democrats and Republicans are swayed by partisanship. This foments false norms of partisan opposition that, in turn, influence people's personal policy support. Correcting misperceived norms of opposition and decoupling policy evaluation from identity concerns would help overcome these seemingly insurmountable barriers to bipartisan support for climate policy.

Toward Surmounting the Psychological Barriers to Climate Policy-Appreciating Contexts and Acknowledging Challenges: A Reply to Weber (2018).

The authors acknowledge and respond to three concerns raised by Weber (2018) about oversimplifying psychological barriers to climate policy. First, skepticism about climate change remains a major barrier to climate policy, along with political partisanship. Second, recognizing multifaceted barriers to climate policy calls for multiple targeted interventions to be implemented at critical junctures. Finally, translating pro-environmental attitudes into action requires an appreciation of proximate sociopolitical contexts and cultures. Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, psychological scientists are well equipped to understand and address the complex barriers to climate policy within the natural flow of everyday social life.

Simulational fluency reduces feelings of psychological distance.

Why do some events feel "like yesterday" whereas others feel "ages away"? Past research has identified cues that influence people's estimates of distance in units such as how many miles or days away events are from the self. However, what makes events feel psychologically close or distant? We examine the hypothesis that increased simulational fluency, the ease with which people mentally imagine events, makes events feel psychologically close. Simulational fluency was associated with feelings that multiple past and future holidays were psychologically close (Studies 1a and 1b). Writing short, easy-to-generate descriptions of Christmas made it feel psychologically closer and more fluently simulated compared with writing longer, difficult-to-generate descriptions (Study 2). This pattern was not anticipated by readers of the same content who did not directly experience the fluency of writing descriptions. Writing descriptions of Halloween made it feel fluently simulated and psychologically close, even as concrete "how" descriptions reduced construal level compared with abstract "why" descriptions (Study 3). Listening to a fluent audio description of a past Super Bowl, compared with a disfluent audio description, caused the game to feel psychologically closer in both space and time (Study 4). Reading a description of the Super Bowl in easy-to-read font, compared with difficult-to-read font, made the game feel more fluently simulated and psychologically closer (Study 5). These findings have implications for theories of psychological distance and its role in everyday life. (PsycINFO Database Record

Attentional accounting: Voluntary spatial attention increases budget category prioritization.

Too often, people fail to prioritize the most important activities, life domains, and budget categories. One reason for misplaced priorities, we argue, is that activities and categories people have frequently or recently attended to seem higher priority than other activities and categories. In Experiment 1, participants were cued to direct voluntary spatial attention toward 1 side of a screen while images depicting different budget categories were presented: 1 category on the cued side and 1 on the noncued side of the screen. Participants rated cued budget categories as higher priority than noncued budget categories. Cued attention also increased perceived distinctiveness, and a mediation model was consistent with the hypothesis that distinctiveness mediates the effect of cued attention on prioritization. Experiment 2 orthogonally manipulated 2 components of a spatial cuing manipulation-heightened visual attention and heightened mental attention-to examine how each influences prioritization. Visual attention and mental attention additively increased prioritization. In Experiment 3, attention increased prioritization even when prioritization decisions were incentivized, and even when heightened attention was isolated from primacy and recency. Across experiments, cued categories were prioritized more than noncued categories even though measures were taken to disguise the purpose of the experiments and manipulate attention incidentally (i.e., as a by-product of an unrelated task). (PsycINFO Database Record

Seeing Red: Anger Increases How Much Republican Identification Predicts Partisan Attitudes and Perceived Polarization.

We examined the effects of incidental anger on perceived and actual polarization between Democrats and Republicans in the context of two national tragedies, Hurricane Katrina (Study 1) and the mass shooting that targeted Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona (Study 2). We hypothesized that because of its relevance to intergroup conflict, incidental anger exacerbates the political polarization effects of issue partisanship (the correlation between partisan identification and partisan attitudes), and, separately, the correlation between conservative partisan identification and perceived polarization between Democrats and Republicans. We further hypothesized that these effects would be strongest for Republican identification because Republican leaders were targets of public criticism in both tragedies and because conservative (Republican) ideology tends to be more sensitive to threat. In the studies, participants first completed an emotion induction procedure by recalling autobiographical events that made them angry (Studies 1 & 2), sad (Studies 1 & 2), or that involved recalling emotionally neutral events (Study 2). Participants later reported their attitudes regarding the two tragedies, their perceptions of the typical Democrat's and Republican's attitudes on those issues, and their identification with the Democratic and Republican parties. Compared with incidental sadness (Studies 1 and 2) and a neutral condition (Study 2), incidental anger exacerbated the associations between Republican identification and partisan attitudes, and, separately between Republican identification and perceived polarization between the attitudes of Democrats and Republicans. We discuss implications for anger's influence on political attitude formation and perceptions of group differences in political attitudes.

Perceiving political polarization in the United States: party identity strength and attitude extremity exacerbate the perceived partisan divide.

An important component of political polarization in the United States is the degree to which ordinary people perceive political polarization. We used over 30 years of national survey data from the American National Election Study to examine how the public perceives political polarization between the Democratic and Republican parties and between Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. People in the United States consistently overestimate polarization between the attitudes of Democrats and Republicans. People who perceive the greatest political polarization are most likely to report having been politically active, including voting, trying to sway others' political beliefs, and making campaign contributions. We present a 3-factor framework to understand ordinary people's perceptions of political polarization. We suggest that people perceive greater political polarization when they (a) estimate the attitudes of those categorized as being in the "opposing group"; (b) identify strongly as either Democrat or Republican; and (c) hold relatively extreme partisan attitudes-particularly when those partisan attitudes align with their own partisan political identity. These patterns of polarization perception occur among both Democrats and Republicans.

Moral Violations Reduce Oral Consumption.

Consumers frequently encounter moral violations in everyday life. They watch movies and television shows about crime and deception, hear news reports of corporate fraud and tax evasion, and hear gossip about cheaters and thieves. How does exposure to moral violations influence consumption? Because moral violations arouse disgust and because disgust is an evolutionarily important signal of contamination that should provoke a multi-modal response, we hypothesize that moral violations affect a key behavioral response to disgust: reduced oral consumption. In three experiments, compared with those in control conditions, people drank less water and chocolate milk while (a) watching a film portraying the moral violations of incest, (b) writing about moral violations of cheating or theft, and (c) listening to a report about fraud and manipulation. These findings imply that "moral disgust" influences consumption in ways similar to core disgust, and thus provide evidence for the associations between moral violations, emotions, and consumer behavior.

Too much experience: a desensitization bias in emotional perspective taking.

People often use their own feelings as a basis to predict others' feelings. For example, when trying to gauge how much someone else enjoys a television show, people might think "How much do I enjoy it?" and use this answer as basis for estimating others' reactions. Although personal experience (such as actually watching the show oneself) often improves empathic accuracy, we found that gaining too much experience can impair it. Five experiments highlight a desensitization bias in emotional perspective taking, with consequences for social prediction, social judgment, and social behavior. Participants who viewed thrilling or shocking images many times predicted first-time viewers would react less intensely (Experiments 1 and 2); participants who heard the same funny joke or annoying noise many times estimated less intense reactions of first-time listeners (Experiments 3 and 4); and further, participants were less likely to actually share good jokes and felt less bad about blasting others with annoying noise after they themselves became desensitized to those events (Experiments 3-5). These effects were mediated by participants' own attenuated reactions. Moreover, observers failed to anticipate this bias, believing that overexposed participants (i.e., repeatedly exposed participants who became desensitized) would make better decisions on their behalf (Experiment 5). Taken together, these findings reveal a novel paradox in emotional perspective taking: If people experience an evocative event many times, they may not become wiser companions but worse, unable to disentangle self-change from other-oriented thinking. Just as lacking exposure to others' experiences can create gaps in empathy and understanding, so may gaining too much.