Br J Soc Psychol
January 2025
Hope is a future-oriented emotion that attunes people to the possibility of positive change, and thus could potentially catalyse societal engagement with climate change. A recent meta-analysis suggests that the relationship between hope and climate action is most robust when the target of hope is climate engagement (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFResearchers are increasingly examining whether hope can motivate action on climate change, or conversely, whether it might demotivate such action. We present a meta-analysis ( = 46) of quantitative studies examining the relationships between measures and manipulations of hope with climate engagement. On average, hope was associated with greater climate engagement ( = 0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPeople appear to empathize with cases of animal suffering yet to disregard such suffering when it conflicts with human needs. In three studies, we used an empathy regulation measure - the empathy selection task - to test whether people choose or avoid sharing in experiences of animals versus humans. In Study 1, when choosing between sharing experiences of animals or humans, participants preferred humans and rated sharing animal (versus human) experiences as more cognitively costly.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Psychol
November 2021
Although many philosophers and environmental psychologists agree that progress toward a more ecologically conscious society depends upon individuals developing a sense of connectedness to nature, such agreement is of limited use if we do not understand how connectedness forms. The purpose of this review is to delineate the state of the psychological literature concerning the antecedents of connectedness to nature. The literature review is organized into three main sections: (1) situational contexts that influence connectedness; (2) individual difference predictors, such as demographic group membership, personality, or beliefs; and (3) internal psychological states that may explain psychological processes that result in connectedness.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBridgeman (2017) describes the important role of population growth in contributing to environmental problems. The present essay argues that population is an important component of human impact on the environment, but it must be considered in combination with consumption rates. A place-based approach, examining the local context for reproductive decisions, is necessary to assess population growth as a contributor to environmental impact and to develop appropriate behavioral interventions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPers Soc Psychol Bull
July 2012
Culture has been shown to influence response styles. The authors conducted two studies to test the notion that African Americans would be more likely to respond to racism directly, whereas Asian Americans would be more likely to respond indirectly and therefore more subtly. Study 1 showed that Black women subjected to a racist comment from a confederate during an online interaction were more likely than Asian women to verbally reproach the perpetrator.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis article addresses the nature and challenge of adaptation in the context of global climate change. The complexity of "climate change" as threat, environmental stressor, risk domain, and impacting process with dramatic environmental and human consequences requires a synthesis of perspectives and models from diverse areas of psychology to adequately communicate and explain how a more psychological framing of the human dimensions of global environmental change can greatly inform and enhance effective and collaborative climate change adaptation and mitigation policies and research. An integrative framework is provided that identifies and considers important mediating and moderating parameters and processes relating to climate change adaptation, with particular emphasis given to environmental stress and stress and coping perspectives.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe are facing rapid changes in the global climate, and these changes are attributable to human behavior. Humans produce this global impact through our use of natural resources, multiplied by the vast increase in population seen in the past 50 to 100 years. Our goal in this article is to examine the underlying psychosocial causes of human impact, primarily through patterns of reproduction and consumption.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGlobal climate change poses one of the greatest challenges facing humanity in this century. This article, which introduces the American Psychologist special issue on global climate change, follows from the report of the American Psychological Association Task Force on the Interface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change. In this article, we place psychological dimensions of climate change within the broader context of human dimensions of climate change by addressing (a) human causes of, consequences of, and responses (adaptation and mitigation) to climate change and (b) the links between these aspects of climate change and cognitive, affective, motivational, interpersonal, and organizational responses and processes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDescriptive information is provided about lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals' everyday experiences with heterosexism. Comparisons are made with participants' experiences with nonheterosexist hassles and with previous research on other types of everyday discrimination. Heterosexist hassles were most likely to be in the form of verbal comments whereas nonheterosexist hassles in the form of behaviors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrevious research demonstrates that people use their mood as information when making a variety of judgments. The present research examines the extent to which people use their current mood as information when making attributions to discrimination. Women were given a positive or negative mood induction and either provided with an external attribution for their current mood state or not.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTwo experiments examined how the goals of self-presentation and maintenance of control over one's outcomes influence women's tendencies to make or to avoid making attributions to discrimination. Demonstrating the importance of self-presentational goals, Experiment 1 showed that targets of discrimination were just as likely as similar others to make attributions to discrimination under private reporting conditions, but they were significantly less likely to do so under public reporting conditions. This experiment also provided initial evidence that need for personal control increases discrimination attributions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFour experiments examined how an actor's intent and the harm experienced by a target influence judgments of prejudice and discrimination. The presence of intent increased the likelihood that participants judged an actor as prejudiced and the actor's behavior as discriminatory. When intent was uncertain, harm influenced judgments of the behavior, which in turn influenced judgments of the actor, and participants were more cautious in their judgments about an actor than an actor's behavior.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe authors tested the hypothesis that members of stigmatized groups would be unwilling to report that negative events that occur to them are the result of discrimination when they are in the presence of members of a nonstigmatized group. Supporting this hypothesis, women and African Americans were more likely to report that a failing grade assigned by a man or a European American was caused by discrimination, rather than by their own lack of ability, when they made the judgment privately and in the presence of a fellow stigmatized group member. However, they were more likely to indicate that the cause of the failure was lack of ability, rather than discrimination, when they expected to make these judgments aloud in the presence of a nonstigmatized group member.
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