The Fridays for Future strikes involve students striking for increased action on climate change, and this movement has spread to 185 countries and received widespread media attention. This ...exploratory study investigates motives for participating or not in the climate strikes and future participation among students in Switzerland. In a sample of N = 638 university students, we found that trust in climate scientists, low trust in governments, response efficacy, protest enjoyment and the perceived success of the strikes predicted participation. Contrary to statements in the public media but consistent with the literature, students who participated in the climate strikes reported consuming less meat, flying less and taking more steps to compensate the CO.sub.2 emissions from flights compared to students who did not participate. We discuss how the insights from this study help reveal the determinants of youth collective action on climate change.
Implicit and explicit biases impede the participation of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematic (STEM) fields. Across career stages, attending conferences and presenting research ...are ways to spread scientific results, find job opportunities, and gain awards. Here, we present an analysis by gender of the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting speaking opportunities from 2014 to 2016. We find that women were invited and assigned oral presentations less often than men. However, when we control for career stage, we see similar rates between women and men and women sometimes outperform men. At the same time, women elect for poster presentations more than men. Male primary conveners allocate invited abstracts and oral presentations to women less often and below the proportion of women authors. These results highlight the need to provide equal opportunity to women in speaking roles at scientific conferences as part of the overall effort to advance women in STEM.
Abstract
The shapes of electoral districts determine how votes translate into seats. When districts favor certain political parties, electoral results can be disproportionate and the public may lose ...faith in the political process. Disagreement about appropriate district shapes is subjective, rarely resolved, and often leads to lawsuits. Previously, many authors have called for objective districting criteria. We offer a novel synthesis of models that enables the proactive comparison of district maps, by relating a planar graph partition, the single-member plurality rule, the maximin decision rule, and any agreed measure of partisan bias with a territorial map and historical vote results. Historical vote totals avoid the complexity and uncertainty associated with counterfactual models of vote swing. Districting plans could be objectively compared on such criteria as party proportionality or compact shape to reject plans with worse bias. Objective tools to reduce partisan bias in district maps could boost collaborative participation, increase perceptions of fairness and justice, and reduce costs.
Understanding how humans navigate the tension between selfish and prosocial behaviour is central to addressing social dilemmas and several environmental issues. Many accounts predict that human ...prosociality would increase in the presence of observing individuals. Previous studies on this observability effect predominantly relied on artificial observability manipulations and low-cost measures of prosociality. In the present Registered Report, we used a recently validated laboratory procedure of repeated dilemmas to test whether the presence of actual observers affects costly prosocial behaviour in the domain of environmental conservation. When completing this dilemma task, participants repeatedly chose between minimizing the length of the laboratory session and minimising wasted energy from a bank of LED lights. Their choices were made either in private or in the presence of actual observers. Contrary to our expectation, we did not observe higher rates of energy-conserving behaviour when participants' choices were being observed. Manipulation and robustness checks indicate that this lack of a finding is unlikely to be owing to arbitrary methodological choices. In view of these findings, we argue that a more comprehensive analysis of situation- and behaviour-specific consequences might be necessary to predict how particular behaviours are affected by observability.
identifying effective summary formats is fundamental to multiple fields including science communication, systematic reviews, evidence-based policy and medical decision-making. This study tested ...whether table or text-only formats lead to better comprehension of the potential harms and benefits of different options, here in a medical context.
pre-registered, longitudinal experiment: between-subjects factorial 2 (message format) × 2 topic (therapeutic or preventative intervention) on comprehension and later recall (CONSORT-SPI 2018).
longitudinal online survey experiment.
2305 census-matched UK residents recruited through the survey panel firm YouGov.
comprehension of harms and benefits and knowledge recall after six weeks.
fact boxes-simple tabular messages-led to more comprehension (
= 0.39) and slightly more knowledge recall after six weeks (
= 0.12) compared to the same information in text. These patterns of results were consistent between the two medical topics and across all levels of objective numeracy and education. Fact boxes were rated as more engaging than text, and there were no differences between formats in treatment decisions, feeling informed or trust.
the brief table format of the fact box improved the comprehension of harms and benefits relative to the text-only control. Effective communication supports informed consent and decision-making and brings ethical and practical advantages. Fact boxes and other summary formats may be effective in a wide range of communication contexts.
•Two experiments investigated bias in self-reported pro-environmental behavior (PEB).•Participants reported slightly more PEB if their environmentalist identity was measured first.•When individual ...responses were masked, participants reported much less PEB.•Salience of social norms regarding PEB did not increase self-reports.•No evidence for a question-behavior effect on self-reported PEB.
Research on pro-environmental behavior (PEB) informs social policies and interventions, so the quality of PEB measurement is critical. Self-reported PEB measures in surveys often contain non-negligible measurement error that can bias estimates and lead to incorrect findings. Given the potential presence of error, we hypothesize that changes to the way self-reported PEB is measured might lead to systematic measurement errors that affect the validity of results. Study 1 (N = 951) showed that priming participants with related scales like environmentalist identity did not substantively change reported behavior (all ds ≤ 0.12). To investigate the possibility of overreporting without priming, Study 2 (N = 385) measured littering prevention behavior using the Unmatched Count Technique. A standard questionnaire format led to much higher reported behavior compared to the more anonymous covert condition, d = 0.53, and this effect appeared driven by participants who reported a stronger environmentalist identity. These results may help to explain some of the observed error in PEB measures. We suggest that researchers could reduce measurement bias with indirect questioning techniques.
Display omitted
We are in a climate emergency. Because governments are reacting too slowly, grassroots collective action is key. Understanding the psychological factors underpinning engagement can facilitate the ...growth of such collective action. Yet, previous research in psychology rarely provided causal evidence for which factors trigger action, lacked focus on the climate crisis, was mostly self-reported behaviour or intentions rather than objective measures, and was mostly cross-sectional rather than longitudinal. Here we conducted a longitudinal study on the effectiveness of a 12-week video intervention designed to increase psychological predictors of collective action. The intervention boosted affective engagement, collective efficacy, and self-efficacy, but did not increase observed attendance of activism events. Interviews suggested that Zoom fatigue and the online study design undercut the social interaction participants wanted in order to join events. However, a smaller in-person replication did not increase activism either. Debriefings suggested that the replication participants were primarily motivated by payment and lacked time or resources for more engagement. These results highlight the crucial importance of going beyond measures of self-reported attitudes or intentions to objectively measuring activism behaviours and showing the difficulty of fostering event attendance.
The aim of this study was to determine whether subjective sleep quality was reduced in medical students, and whether demographics and sleep hygiene behaviors were associated with sleep quality. A ...Web-based survey was completed by 314 medical students, containing questions about demographics, sleep habits, exercise habits, caffeine, tobacco and alcohol use, and subjective sleep quality (using the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index). Correlation and regression analyses tested for associations among demographics, sleep hygiene behaviors, and sleep quality. As hypothesized, medical students' sleep quality was significantly worse than a healthy adult normative sample (t = 5.13, p < .001). Poor sleep quality in medical students was predicted by several demographic and sleep hygiene variables, and future research directions are proposed.
Awareness of environmental problems has increased dramatically over recent decades, but individual action to address environmental issues has remained stagnant. Shifting social identities may be an ...under-appreciated explanation of this gap: identification with environmentalists in the U.S. dropped from 78% to 42% since 1991. In four pre-registered studies of U.S. residents (total N = 2,033), we explored the predictors and outcomes of environmentalist identity. We also developed a novel implicit measure of less deliberate aspects of environmentalist identity. We used explicit and implicit environmentalist identity to predict self-reported environmental behaviors and policy preferences. Meta-analysis of our pre-registered studies revealed that explicit identity was moderately associated with implicit identity (r = 0.24). Explicit identity strongly and uniquely predicted pro-environmental behaviors and policy preferences (partial rs = .58, .62), while implicit identity did not uniquely predict either (partial rs = .05, .05). Our findings highlight the importance of social identity in conservation.
•Environmentalist identity is associated with behavior and policy preferences.•We introduce a novel implicit measure of environmentalist identity.•Explicit identity is a strong and unique predictor of pro-environmental action.•Implicit identity is not a unique predictor of pro-environmental action.•We examine dispositional predictors of environmentalist identity.
PDF
