Climate action literacy interventions increase commitments to more effective mitigation behaviors

Danielle Goldwert; Yash Patel; Kristian Steensen Nielsen; Matthew H Goldberg; Madalina Vlasceanu

doi:10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf191

Climate action literacy interventions increase commitments to more effective mitigation behaviors

PNAS Nexus. 2025 Jun 9;4(6):pgaf191. doi: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf191. eCollection 2025 Jun.

Authors

Danielle Goldwert¹, Yash Patel², Kristian Steensen Nielsen³, Matthew H Goldberg⁴, Madalina Vlasceanu^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY 10003, USA.
² Department of Environmental Social Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
³ Department of Management, Society and Communication, Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg 2000, Denmark.
⁴ Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06511, USA.

Abstract

Reducing lifestyle carbon emissions is a critical component of decarbonizing society. However, people hold substantial misperceptions about the relative efficacy of different behavioral changes, such as comprehensively recycling or avoiding long flights, and these misperceptions may lead to the suboptimal allocation of resources. In a preregistered experiment in the United States, we 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 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. 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. Greater initial misperceptions were associated with larger shifts in commitments, such that participants reduced commitments to behaviors that were overestimated and increased commitments to behaviors that were underestimated in their carbon reduction potential. However, we 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.

Keywords: behavior; climate; intervention; misperception; spillover.