Publications by authors named "Aart van Stekelenburg"
Article Synopsis
- Scientists did a big survey with over 59,000 people from 63 countries to understand how people think about climate change!
- They tested different ways to encourage people to believe in climate change and support actions to help the environment!
- The study includes lots of information and data that can help others learn more about what influences people's actions on climate change around the world!
Article Synopsis
- Effective global behavior change is crucial for reducing climate change, but it's unclear which strategies motivate people to shift their beliefs and actions.
- A study tested 11 interventions on nearly 60,000 participants across 63 countries, finding small effectiveness primarily among non-skeptics and varied results across different outcomes.
- Key results showed that reducing psychological distance strengthened beliefs, writing a letter to a future generation increased policy support, and inducing negative emotions encouraged information sharing, but no strategy successfully boosted tree-planting efforts.
Objective: In most countries, vaccine uptake is a voluntary decision. If people experience threats to this freedom, for example, by pro-vaccination media campaigns or government pressure, psychological reactance may be induced. To regain freedom, the opposite behaviour (vaccine refusal) may become more attractive, forming a vaccination barrier.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFScientific-consensus communication is among the most promising interventions to minimize the gap between experts' and the public's belief in scientific facts. There is, however, discussion about its effectiveness in changing consensus perceptions and beliefs about contested science topics. This preregistered meta-analysis assessed the effects of communicating the existence of scientific consensus on perceived scientific consensus and belief in scientific facts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSome people hold beliefs that are opposed to overwhelming scientific evidence. Such misperceptions can be harmful to both personal and societal well-being. Communicating scientific consensus has been found to be effective in eliciting scientifically accurate beliefs, but it is unclear whether it is also effective in correcting false beliefs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHow do situations influence food desire? Although eating typically occurs in rich background situations, research on food desire often focuses on the properties of foods and consumers, rather than on the situations in which eating takes place. Here, we take a grounded cognition perspective and suggest that a situation that is congruent with consuming a food increases simulations of eating it, which, in turn, affect desire, and the expected and actual liking of the food. We tested this idea in four pre-registered experiments (N = 524).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The COVID-19 infodemic, a surge of information and misinformation, has sparked worry about the public's perception of the coronavirus pandemic. Excessive information and misinformation can lead to belief in false information as well as reduce the accurate interpretation of true information. Such incorrect beliefs about the COVID-19 pandemic might lead to behavior that puts people at risk of both contracting and spreading the virus.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF