Benjamin A Converse

University of Virginia | UVa · Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy

The United States recently passed major federal laws supporting the energy transition. Analyses suggest that their successful implementation could reduce US emissions more than 40% below 2005 levels by 2030. However, achieving maximal emissions reductions would require frictionless supply and demand responses to the laws’ incentives and implementat...

Climate despair—a sense of hopelessness about humanity’s ability to pursue a sustainable future—is emerging as a psychosocial threat. Psychological science conceptualizes hopelessness as a cognitive schema characterized by negative expectancies. Climate hopelessness, then, may be conceptualized as a mental model that represents climate change as a...

In 2002, a group of investigators joined forces to propose a new conceptual paradigm based on a cognitive approach to motivation. This approach, referred to as goal systems theory, offered a broad perspective on behavioral phenomena and inspired research programs in diverse domains of psychological science. The present volume collects the rich body...

Many of the most important competitions in business, politics, sports, and day-to-day social life occur not between strangers who happen to have negatively linked goals, but between parties who have a shared history of notable competitions—that is, between rivals. Despite psychology’s long and rich history of studying competition, the concerted stu...

As climate predictions become more dire, it is increasingly clear that society cannot rely on mitigation alone. In response, climatologists and engineers have been developing climate-engineering technology to directly intervene on the climate through strategies such as solar radiation management and carbon dioxide removal. While these technologies...

The social landscape of climate change is shifting. As more people acknowledge the urgency of the problem and society’s underwhelming response to it, climate despair threatens to become a major contributor to personal inaction. In this moment, people need reason for hope. Recent research shows that climate hope, where it exists, is largely social:...

Improving objects, ideas or situations—whether a designer seeks to advance technology, a writer seeks to strengthen an argument or a manager seeks to encourage desired behaviour—requires a mental search for possible changes1–3. We investigated whether people are as likely to consider changes that subtract components from an object, idea or situatio...

Motivation derived from a sense of truly valuing or enjoying one’s pursuits (“wanting to do it”)—as opposed to motivation born of external demands or other people’s expectations (“having to do it”)—is associated with goal-pursuit success and overall well-being. But what determines the quality of motivation in the first place? Many theoretical persp...

To move from commitment to action, planners must think about the future and decide when to initiate. We demonstrate that planners prefer to initiate on upcoming days that immediately follow a temporal boundary. For example, aspiring dieters who considered a time horizon from Thursday, February 27th to Tuesday, March 4th showed expectation increases...

Significance When determining responsibility for harmful actions, people often consider whether the actor behaved intentionally. The spread of surveillance cameras, “on-officer” recording devices, and smart-phone video makes it increasingly likely that such judgments are aided by video replay. Yet, little is known about how different qualities of t...

By the time children begin formal schooling, their experiences at home have already contributed to large variations in their math and language development, and once school begins, academic achievement continues to depend strongly on influences outside of school. It is thus essential that educational reform strategies involve primary caregivers. Spe...

Seven studies converge to show that prompting people to think about a rival versus a nonrival competitor causes them to view current competitions as more connected to past ones, to be more concerned with long-term legacy, and to pursue personal goals in a more eager, less cautious manner. These results are consistent with a social-cognitive view of...

People often face outcomes of important events that are beyond their personal control, such as when they wait for an acceptance letter, job offer, or medical test results. We suggest that when wanting and uncertainty are high and personal control is lacking, people may be more likely to help others, as if they can encourage fate's favor by doing go...

We propose that in social interactions, appreciation of a helper depends on that helper's instrumentality: The more motivated one is to accomplish a goal, and the more one perceives a helper as able to facilitate that goal, the more appreciation one will feel for that helper. Four experiments supported this instrumentality-boost hypothesis by showi...

1 Despite knowing well that “you can’t have your cake and eat it too, ” people still want many conflicting things at once. That is, people want to fulfill short-term desires and they want to do so without obstructing their long-term interests. Thus, weight watchers wish to eat many delicious cakes and they also wish not to look like they have eaten...

Seven studies tested the hypothesis that people use subjective time progression in hedonic evaluation. When people believe that time has passed unexpectedly quickly, they rate tasks as more engaging, noises as less irritating, and songs as more enjoyable. We propose that felt time distortion operates as a metacognitive cue that people implicitly at...

People often reason egocentrically about others' beliefs, using their own beliefs as an inductive guide. Correlational, experimental, and neuroimaging evidence suggests that people may be even more egocentric when reasoning about a religious agent's beliefs (e.g., God). In both nationally representative and more local samples, people's own beliefs...

Unlike economic exchange, social exchange has no well-defined "value." It is based on the norm of reciprocity, in which giving and taking are to be repaid in equivalent measure. Although giving and taking are colloquially assumed to be equivalent actions, we demonstrate that they produce different patterns of reciprocity. In five experiments utiliz...

Understanding others' behavior often involves attributing mental states to them by using one's "theory of mind." We argue that using theory of mind to recognize differences between one's own perspective and another's perspective is a deliberate process of inference that may be influenced by incidental mood. Because sadness is associated with more s...