CARBON COMPETENCE.

Our manuscript, Widespread misestimates of greenhouse gas emissions suggest low carbon competence, was recently published in Nature Climate Change. This is the first manuscript from the Sustainability & Behavior (SAB) Lab at Columbia Business School, a multidisciplinary research group established in 2021 (co-chaired by Drs. Eric Johnson, Vicki Morwitz, Gita Johar, and Michael Morris, and managed by me). You can read the abstract below, and access the published article here.

As concern with climate change increases, people seek to behave and consume sustainably. This requires understanding which behaviours, firms and industries have the greatest impact on emissions. Here we ask if people are knowledgeable enough to make choices that align with growing sustainability intentions. Across five studies, we (1) demonstrate that accuracy of individuals’ emissions-related estimates is limited, (2) provide evidence that this misestimation is consistent with a cognitive process of attribute substitution and (3) identify conditions that do (and do not) moderate estimation accuracy. Our findings suggest that individuals’ efficacy as consumers, investors and citizens is currently hampered by their misjudgements of carbon impact. We advocate accessible and easily understandable information that highlights the causal impact of consumption decisions to facilitate climate action.

In the Press

EXPOSING OMITTED MODERATORS.

Artistic interpretation of the paper, painted by Rotterdam-based artist Philipp Schwalb (husband of friend/coauthor, Antonia Krefeld-Schwalb).

Exposing omitted moderators: Explaining why effect sizes differ in the social sciences, authored by Antonia Krefeld-Schwalb, myself, and Eric Johnson, was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (of the United States of America). You can read the abstract below, and access the published article here.

Policymakers increasingly rely on behavioral science in response to global challenges, such as climate change or global health crises. But applications of behavioral science face an important problem: Interventions often exert substantially different effects across contexts and individuals. We examine this heterogeneity for different paradigms that underlie many behavioral interventions. We study the paradigms in a series of five pre-registered studies across one in-person and 10 online panels, with over 11,000 respondents in total. We find substantial heterogeneity across settings and paradigms, apply techniques for modeling the heterogeneity, and introduce a framework that measures typically omitted moderators. The framework’s factors (Fluid Intelligence, Attentiveness, Crystallized Intelligence, and Experience) affect the effectiveness of many text-based interventions, producing different observed effect sizes and explaining variations across samples. Moderators are associated with effect sizes through two paths, with the intensity of the manipulation and with the effect of the manipulation directly. Our results motivate observing these moderators and provide a theoretical and empirical framework for understanding and predicting varying effect sizes in the social sciences.

THE LOCAL WARMING EFFECT.

Local warming is real: A meta-analysis of the effect of recent temperature on climate change beliefs, by myself, Ye Li, and Eric Johnson, was published in 2021 in the journal Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences. You can read the abstract below, and access the published article here.

Climate change is a complex phenomenon that the public learns about both abstractly through media and education, and concretely through personal experiences. While public beliefs about global warming may be controversial in some circles, an emerging body of research on the ‘local warming’ effect suggests that people’s judgments of climate change or global warming are impacted by recent, local temperatures. A meta-analysis including 31 observations across 82 952 participants derived from 17 papers published since 2006 found a small but significant effect overall: a 1°C increase in temperature increases worry about climate change by 1.2%. Moderation analysis found larger effects for temperatures over longer time frames and smaller effects for behaviors versus beliefs. We also review conceptually related effects due to other extreme weather events, as well as effects on behaviors related to climate change beliefs.

THE MERE SHARING EFFECT.

Misinformation is a massive problem. Much research in this space explores what leads people to share misinformation and how others perceive that misinformation. This project was born from a curiosity about the intersection of these streams: The effects of sharing misinformation on the sharers themselves. People share for many reasons (e.g., to spark a debate or poll one’s network) and do not necessarily restrain their sharing to content that they themselves believe to be true. The Mere Sharing Effect describes the effect of sharing misinformation on the sharer’s own perception of the truth of that content. This manuscript is currently under review at the Journal of Consumer Research. You can read the abstract below.

Individuals usually strive to share true information. On social media, however, they are often distracted and share ambiguous (or even false) information intended to socialize or entertain. This research suggests that individuals evaluate ambiguous information as more truthful after sharing it. This mere sharing effect is driven not only by public self-perception concerns, but also by private self-perception concerns and the need to perceive oneself as truthful. In three online experiments, we demonstrate the mere sharing effect and suggest that it is driven by the sharer’s self-perception (Study 1), does not depend on the sharer’s sense of accountability (Study 2), and persists even when the sharer merely intends to (but does not actually) share (Study 3). This research extends the literature on information sharing by exploring the consequential effects of sharing on the sharer’s perceptions. By showing that information is perceived to be more true simply because it was shared, we help explain consumers’ susceptibility to misinformation. These findings provide an opportunity and framework for future researchers to further investigate the consequences of sharing on sharer’s perceptions and attitudes.

CONSUMERS & CORPORATE LOBBYING.

How does corporate lobbying activity influence consumers’ attitudes and perceptions?

This project is relatively new. If you’d like to collaborate, please don’t hesitate to reach out!