Climate Collaboration Project wins Cialdini Prize

We are pleased to announce that the paper "Addressing climate change with behavioral science: A global intervention tournament in 63 countries" has won the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) Robert Cialdini Prize for 2025, which rewards a single outstanding contribution that uses field methods and settings to demonstrate the relevance of social psychology to outside groups and communities. The research team comprises 256 authors, including SoCo lab's own Dr. Lusine Grigoryan, testing 11 climate change mitigation belief and behavioural interventions across 59,440 participants.

Out of the crowd-sourced, evidence-based interventions that were tested, the team found that (1) climate change beliefs can be strengthened most effectively by decreasing the psychological distance of climate change; (2) support for climate change mitigation policy can be improved by writing a letter detailing personal climate change mitigation actions, to be read in the future by a child who is close to the individual; and (3) reported willingness to share climate change related posts on social media is most increased after seeing “doom and gloom" messaging about the consequences of climate change, which induce negative emotions in the recipient. Interestingly, half of the chosen interventions had no effect on the more effortful climate positive behaviour of tree-planting, while the other half actually reduced the number of trees that participants planted. Importantly, these interventions had differing levels of impact between climate change skeptics, those uncertain about climate change, and those who believe in it, highlighting the importance of targeting interventions.

The full article can be found here, along with the official SPSP announcement here.