Tools- of Changes

Climate Action Literacy Interventions Increase Commitments to More Effective Mitigation Behaviors

People hold substantial misperceptions about the relative efficacy of different climate change mitigation behaviors. Providing information about the relative mitigation potential of each behavior can help people recalibrate their understanding and increase their commitment to more impactful individual-level climate behaviors.

• In a 2024 preregistered experiment in the United States, the authors tested the effects of two literacy interventions on correcting misperceptions and increasing commitments toward more effective individual-level climate actions.
• Participants (n = 3,895) were first asked to rate the degree to which they could commit to engaging in 26 carbon emission-reducing behaviors. Of these, 21 were individual-level behaviors, and five were collective climate actions.
• Then the participants were randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions: a Prediction condition, in which they were asked to rank the relative mitigation potential of 21 climate behaviors after which they received feedback; an Information condition, in which they were passively exposed to information about the relative mitigation potential of the same behaviors; and a no-information Control condition.
• Following this procedure, all participants again rated their commitment levels for each of the behaviors. Participants then rated how effective they perceived each behavior to be in terms of carbon mitigation potential, and how easy or difficult it would be for them to engage in each behavior.
• The researchers found that participants significantly underestimated the mitigation potential of high-impact behaviors like not adopting a dog or taking one fewer long-haul flights, while greatly overestimating the potential of low-impact behaviors like using efficient appliances or recycling comprehensively. This was the case across demographic groups (political ideology, age, income, education, and gender.
• Both the Prediction and Information interventions led to more accurate efficacy perceptions and increased commitments to engage in higher-impact individual-level actions relative to the Control group.
• The researchers also found evidence for a negative spillover effect from individual to collective actions: participants in the literacy conditions decreased their commitments to collective climate actions such as voting or marching, suggesting an unintended consequence of interventions focusing solely on individual-level actions.