Accounting for Sociopolitical Feedbacks to Identify Barriers and Opportunities for Collective Climate Action

Abstract How individuals and communities perceive and respond to risk is deeply shaped by psychological, social, and cultural forces. While engineering and economics often conceptualize risk in terms of probabilistic outcomes, psychology understands risk as a subjective, affective, and socially mediated experience—one that varies across individuals, groups, and contexts. Recent research shows that various social and psychological factors, such as social identities and social norms, impact how individuals respond to experience of climate risks — and that these responses often depart from objective measures of risk exposure. These same forces also impact how individuals respond to interventions aimed at increasing climate action. This talk examines how risk perceptions change following experience with extreme events, and how social norms shape and constrain collective action on climate change. This research points to potential avenues - as well as potential challenges - for bottom-up changes in climate concern and action that may be especially relevant in a context of limited top-down actions to mitigate the risks associated with climate change.

Biography

Dr. Sara Constantino is an assistant professor at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability in the Department of Environmental Social Sciences and a visiting research scholar at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. She is also a faculty affiliate at SPARQ and the Social Science Environmental Health Research Institute. Her research focuses on understanding the interplay between individual, collective, institutional and ecological factors, including how they shape preferences, decisions, experiences and resilience to extreme events or shocks. Prior to starting at Stanford, she was an assistant professor in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and the Department of Psychology at Northeastern University and an associate research scholar at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. She received her bachelor’s degree in economics from McGill University, a master’s degree in economics from University College London, a Ph.D. in cognitive and decision sciences from New York University, and did a postdoc focused on environmental policy, politics and decision-making at Princeton University.

Dr. Elke Weber is the Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor in Energy and the Environment and Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University. She is a member of both the German and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. In 2016, she received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Society for Risk Analysis, in 2023 the Patrick Suppes Prize from the American Philosophical Society, and in 2024 the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Social Sciences.