Drawing on research in psychology, neuroscience, communication, and environmental science, an interdisciplinary team of researchers at the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) and Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication and School of Arts and Sciences ran an “intervention tournament” to test 17 strategies for motivating people to act on climate change.
Survey data show that most people believe climate change is happening, but many don’t act. “People may struggle to understand how the issue is relevant to them or people they know [relevance], focus on the present instead of future consequences [future thinking], or feel like their actions don’t matter [response efficacy],” says lead author Alyssa (Allie) Sinclair, the Joan Bossert Postdoctoral Research Fellow at APPC and the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, & the Media (PCSSM), a partner center of APPC.
In an “intervention tournament” with 7,624 U.S. adults, Penn researchers including Sinclair, APPC Climate Communication Division Director Emily Falk, and PCSSM Director Michael Mann tested 17 interventions targeting the themes of relevance, future thinking, and response efficacy to see which were most effective for motivating action.
“We find that helping them think about the future—especially when that future involves themselves and people they care about—is the most effective way to motivate action,” Sinclair says. This is true for motivating both individual actions, such as driving less or eating vegetarian meals, and collective actions, such as donating or volunteering. Interventions emphasizing relevance—why climate change should matter to you and people you care about—were the most effective in motivating people to share articles and petitions. Their findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study — conducted among participants who affirm the existence and anthropogenic causes of climate change — found that two strategies targeting future thinking had the strongest impact on intentions to act: imagining oneself experiencing a negative future that could result from not addressing climate change, and writing a letter for a child to read in the future. Both increased intentions to engage in both collective and individual actions.
“There is a huge gulf between the actions people tend to think make a difference, and the actions that actually make a difference when it comes to climate action,” Mann says. “Practitioners, i.e. communicators and organizations that participate in climate communication, could increase their effectiveness by incorporating the key findings of this and related work.”
“Overall, we recommend illustrating future scenarios and emphasizing the personal and social impact of climate change as leading strategies to promote behavior change and information sharing,” the authors write. Additionally, they note that their findings around behavior change, motivation, and information sharing have potential applications in domains beyond climate action, such as for motivating healthy behaviors or civic engagement.
“Behavioral interventions motivate action to address climate change” by Alyssa H. Sinclair, Danielle Cosme, Kirsten Lydic, Diego A. Reinero, José Carreras-Tartak, Michael E. Mann, and Emily B. Falk on May 13, 2025. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2426768122.
This story was originally published in Penn Today. Read the full story here.
