Climate change and health equity: A research agenda for psychological science.

Climate change poses unique and substantial threats to public health and well-being, from heat stress, flooding, and the spread of infectious disease to food and water insecurity, conflict, displacement, and direct health hazards linked to fossil fuels. These threats are especially acute for frontline communities. Addressing climate change and its unequal impacts requires psychologists to consider temporal and spatial dimensions of health, compound risks, as well as structural sources of vulnerability implicated by few other public health challenges.

Ethics, morality, and the psychology of climate justice.

Climate change is increasingly understood as a social justice issue by academics, policymakers, and the public; however, the nature of these perceptions and their implications for cooperation and decision-making have only recently begun to receive empirical attention. We review emerging empirical work that suggests that morality and justice perceptions can serve as both a bridge and a barrier to cooperation around climate change and highlight two critical areas for future development, identifying psychological processes that promote and impede climate vulnerability and that enhance equity in the design and implementation of climate solutions. We argue that conceptualizing climate justice as a multidimensional process addressing both social and structural barriers can stimulate new psychological research and help align disparate approaches within the social sciences.

Using qualitative approaches to improve quantitative inferences in environmental psychology.

This article describes the qualitative approach used to generate and interpret the quantitative study reported by Song and colleagues' (2020) in their article, "What counts as an 'environmental' issue? Differences in environmental issue conceptualization across race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status." Song and colleagues (2020) describe the results of a survey documenting that, in the United States, White and high-SES respondents perceive environmental issues differently than their non-White and lower-SES counterparts, reflecting structural differences in environmental risks. While Song and colleagues (2020) discuss the survey results in detail, the discussion of the qualitative research that led to the creation of that survey was limited due to space constraints.

Diverse segments of the US public underestimate the environmental concerns of minority and low-income Americans.

In a nationally representative survey experiment, diverse segments of the US public underestimated the environmental concerns of nonwhite and low-income Americans and misperceived them as lower than those of white and more affluent Americans. Moreover, both whites and nonwhites and higher- and lower-income respondents associated the term "environmentalist" with whites and the well-educated, suggesting that shared cultural stereotypes may drive these misperceptions. This environmental belief paradox-a tendency to misperceive groups that are among the most environmentally concerned and most vulnerable to a wide range of environmental impacts as least concerned about the environment-was largely invariant across demographic groups and also extended to the specific issue of climate change.

When does deprivation motivate future-oriented thinking? The case of climate change.

Pepper & Nettle overstate cross-domain evidence of present-oriented thinking among lower-socioeconomic-status (SES) groups and overlook key social and contextual drivers of temporal decision making. We consider psychological research on climate change - a quintessential intertemporal problem that implicates inequities and extrinsic mortality risk - documenting more future-oriented thinking among low- compared to high-SES groups.

Social Climate Science: A New Vista for Psychological Science.

The recent Paris Agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions, adopted by 195 nations at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, signaled unprecedented commitment by world leaders to address the human social aspects of climate change. Indeed, climate change increasingly is recognized by scientists and policymakers as a social issue requiring social solutions. However, whereas psychological research on intrapersonal and some group-level processes (e.

Nutrient-centrism and perceived risk of chronic disease.

This experiment explored consequences of two common lay theories about the diet-disease link: nutrient-centrism, the belief that nutrients (e.g. potassium) are crucial to staving off disease, and whole-food centrism, the belief that whole foods (e.

Anxiety perseverance in intergroup interaction: When incidental explanations backfire.

Intergroup interactions are often anxiety provoking, and this can lead members of both majority and minority groups to avoid contact. Whereas negative consequences of experiencing intergroup anxiety are well documented, the role of perceived anxiety has received substantially less theoretical and empirical attention. We demonstrate in 3 experiments that the perception of anxiety in others can undermine intergroup interactions even when the anxiety can be attributed to a source that is unrelated to the interaction.

Racial attitudes and visual cues in political judgments: support for Obama during the 2008 presidential election.

The present longitudinal study examined the complex role of race-including racial attitudes and visual representations of race-in White Americans' responses to Obama during the 2008 U.S. presidential election.

The fragility of intergroup relations: divergent effects of delayed audiovisual feedback in intergroup and intragroup interaction.

Intergroup interactions between racial or ethnic majority and minority groups are often stressful for members of both groups; however, the dynamic processes that promote or alleviate tension in intergroup interaction remain poorly understood. Here we identify a behavioral mechanism-response delay-that can uniquely contribute to anxiety and promote disengagement from intergroup contact. Minimally acquainted White, Black, and Latino participants engaged in intergroup or intragroup dyadic conversation either in real time or with a subtle temporal disruption (1-s delay) in audiovisual feedback.

Perspective and prejudice: antecedents and mediating mechanisms.

The present work investigated mechanisms by which Whites' prejudice toward Blacks can be reduced (Study 1) and explored how creating a common ingroup identity can reduce prejudice by promoting these processes (Study 2). In Study 1, White participants who viewed a videotape depicting examples of racial discrimination and who imagined the victim's feelings showed greater decreases in prejudice toward Blacks than did those in the objective and no instruction conditions. Among the potential mediating affective and cognitive variables examined, reductions in prejudice were mediated primarily by feelings associated with perceived injustice.