The Effects of Climate Action Interventions along Cultural Individualism-Collectivism

Abstract

As the climate crisis demands global engagement, it is crucial to understand how interventions influence individuals across cultural backgrounds. Are interventions more effective when aligned with the cultural values of a target population? To investigate, we evaluated eleven behavioral interventions aimed at stimulating climate change mitigation, along cultural individualism and collectivism orientations, in a large sample (N=59,440) spanning 63 countries. At baseline, we found the more individualistic a nation, the less its residents believed in climate change, supported mitigation policy, and intended to share information, but did not plant fewer trees in an online task. Critically, while some interventions were more effective in individualistic (decreasing psychological distance), and some in collectivistic nations (emphasizing social norms), others were effective in both (writing a letter to the future generation). These results reveal that individualism is a significant barrier to climate mitigation, and the efficacy of interventions hinges on cultural contexts.

Psychological interventions increase motivation to exert effort to mitigate climate change

“…However, we did not compare between countries to maintain power and as we did not have a-priori hypotheses on similarities or differences. Future research could examine climate motivation in more countries, and capture cultural differences that may have hypothesised links to climate motivation such as individualism-collectivism 36 . While challenging for experimental tasks, it would also be beneficial to recruit participants with less access to technology, who may be more likely to be experiencing damaging consequences of climate change.…”

“…The GLMMs of Κs used a gamma distribution with log link function, to account for the nature of the data without transforming raw values. Analysis of β parameters used an LMM and choices to exert effort on the WEPT were analysed with cumulative link mixed models as previously 36 , each with a fixed effect of intervention and subject-level random intercept. In all models, intervention was coded using treatment contrasts to compare each intervention to the control group reference, whereas cause was coded using sum-to-zero contrasts.…”

“…to examine whether the impact of interventions is sustained over longer time periods and how effectiveness differs between individuals and countries2,36 . How to tailor interventions to individuals' baseline levels of climate beliefs and motivation is an important open question29 .…”