Kimberly C Doell

University of Vienna | UniWien

The climate crisis and the human brain are intricately connected. Climate change impacts neurocognitive health, while climate actions both shape and are shaped by the brain. However, research examining these connections remains scarce. This review highlights how neuroscience can deepen the understanding of the reciprocal relationship between climat...

A substantial number of people across the globe deny and minimize the role of human action in climate change, which can inhibit mitigation efforts. Climate communication research shows that scientific-consensus communication is a promising intervention to tackle climate denial, yet most research investigating this strategy was conducted in the Glob...

We examined data from 59,508 participants across 63 countries to construct a measure of climate policy support and document associations with political orientation across the resulting scale. Preregistered analyses identified a three-factor model capturing support for tax-based, nature protection, and green transition policies. The scale demonstrat...

The replication crisis in psychology and related sciences contributed to the adoption of large-scale research initiatives known as Big Team Science (BTS). BTS has made significant advances in addressing issues of replication, statistical power, and diversity through the use of larger samples and more representative cross-cultural data. However, whi...

Scholars warn that partisan divisions in the mass public threaten the health of American democracy. We conducted a megastudy ( n = 32,059 participants) testing 25 treatments designed by academics and practitioners to reduce Americans’ partisan animosity and antidemocratic attitudes. We find that many treatments reduced partisan animosity, most stro...

Climate change is currently one of humanity’s greatest threats. To help scholars understand the psychology of climate change, we conducted an online quasi-experimental survey on 59,508 participants from 63 countries (collected between July 2022 and July 2023). In a between-subjects design, we tested 11 interventions designed to promote climate chan...

This chapter explores the intersection of social neuroscience and pro-environmental behavior to understand how prosocial neuroscientific approaches can inform and enhance climate change mitigation efforts. It emphasizes the critical role of understanding cognitive, affective, and motivational antecedents of behavior to address climate change effect...

We used machine learning to extract unique insights from a recent dataset across 55 countries (N = 4,635). The current analysis identifies the most important individual-level and nation-level predictors of climate-friendly beliefs and behaviors. Interpretable machine learning ranked 19 variables by importance for predicting climate change belief, p...

A major barrier to climate change mitigation is the political polarization of climate change beliefs. In a global experiment conducted in 60 countries (N = 51,224), we assess the differential impact of eleven climate interventions across the ideological divide. At baseline, we find political polarization of climate change beliefs and policy support...

A major barrier to climate change mitigation is the political polarization of climate change beliefs. In a global experiment conducted in 60 countries (N = 51,224), we assess the differential impact of eleven climate interventions across the ideological divide. At baseline, we find political polarization of climate change beliefs and policy support...

As the climate crisis demands global engagement, it is crucial to understand how interventions influence individuals across cultural backgrounds. Are interventions more effective when aligned with the cultural values of a target population? To investigate, we evaluated eleven behavioral interventions aimed at stimulating climate change mitigation,...

Scientific information is crucial for evidence-based decision-making. Public trust in science can help decision-makers act based on the best available evidence, especially during crises such as climate change or the COVID-19 pandemic 1,2. However, in recent years the epistemic authority of science has been challenged, causing concerns about low pub...

Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and a...

Science is integral to society because it can inform individual, government, corporate, and civil society decision-making on issues such as climate change. Yet, public distrust and populist sentiment may challenge the relationship between science and society. To help researchers analyse the science society nexus across different cultural contexts,...

Scientific information is crucial for evidence-based decision-making. Public trust in science can help decision-makers act based on the best available evidence, especially during crises such as climate change or the COVID-19 pandemic. However, in recent years the epistemic authority of science has been challenged, causing concerns about low public...

Despite widespread concern about climate change, a majority of people are not engaging in climate actions necessary to help decrease the risks posed by the climate emergency. Could the language used to refer to the changing climate make a difference in attempts to mobilize the population into action? The mixed results in the scientific literature p...

Climate change is currently one of humanity’s greatest threats. To help scholars understand the psychology of climate change, we conducted an online quasi-experimental survey on 59,508 participants from 63 countries (collected between July 2022 and July 2023). In a between-subjects design, we tested 11 interventions designed to promote climate chan...

Effectively reducing climate change requires dramatic, global behavior change. Yet it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an e...

System-level change is crucial for solving society's most pressing problems. However, individual-level interventions may be useful for creating behavioral change before system-level change is in place and for increasing necessary public support for system-level solutions. Participating in individual-level solutions may increase support for system-l...

Deep partisan conflict in the mass public threatens the stability of American democracy. We conducted a megastudy (n=32,059) testing 25 interventions designed by academics and practitioners to reduce Americans’ partisan animosity and anti-democratic attitudes. We find nearly every intervention reduced partisan animosity, most strongly by highlighti...

System-level change is crucial for solving society’s most pressing problems. However, individual-level interventions may be useful for creating behavioral change before system- level change is in place and for increasing necessary public support for system-level solutions. Participating in individual-level solutions may increase support for system-...

Partisan and ideological identities are a consistent barrier to the adoption of climate change mitigation policies, especially in countries where fossil fuel reliance is the highest. We review how understanding collective cognition may help overcome such barriers by changing norms, promoting cooperation, downplaying partisan identities, or leveragi...

Emotions are powerful drivers of human behavior that may make people aware of the urgency to act to mitigate climate change and provide a motivational basis to engage in sustainable action. However, attempts to leverage emotions via climate communications have yielded unsatisfactory results, with many interventions failing to produce the desired be...

We would like to acknowledge research assistance of Michael Doré, Paul Lecorre, Elsa Kassardjian, as well as support of several Climate Collage facilitators.

Emotions are powerful drivers of human behavior that may make people aware of the urgency to act to mitigate climate change and provide a motivational basis to engage in sustainable action. However, attempts to leverage emotions via climate communications have yielded unsatisfactory results, with many interventions failing to produce the desired be...

Partisan and ideological identities are a consistent barrier to the adoption of climate change mitigation policies, especially in Anglophone countries where fossil fuel reliance is the highest. We review how understanding collective cognition may help overcome such barriers by changing norms, promoting cooperation, downplaying partisan identities,...

The spread of misinformation, including “fake news,” propaganda, and conspiracy theories, represents a serious threat to society, as it has the potential to alter beliefs, behavior, and policy. Research is beginning to disentangle how and why misinformation is spread and identify processes that contribute to this social problem. We propose an integ...

The spread of misinformation, including “fake news,” disinformation, and conspiracy theories, represents a serious threat to society, as it has the potential to alter beliefs, behavior, and policy. Research is beginning to disentangle how and why misinformation is spread and identify processes that contribute to this social problem. Here, we review...

Background-: Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by maladaptive social functioning, and widespread negativity biases. The neural underpinnings of these impairments remain elusive. We thus tested whether BPD patients show atypical neural activity when processing social (compared to non-social) anticipation, feedback, and particul...

Patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) often engage in dangerous self-injurious behaviors (SIBs) as a maladaptive technique to decrease heightened feelings of distress (e.g. negative feelings caused by social exclusion). The reward system has recently been proposed as a plausible neural substrate, which may influence the interaction be...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0166675.].

Learning how to gain rewards (approach learning) and avoid punishments (avoidance learning) is fundamental for everyday life. While individual differences in approach and avoidance learning styles have been related to genetics and aging, the contribution of personality factors, such as traits, remains undetermined. Moreover, little is known about t...

The idea that creativity resides in the right cerebral hemisphere is persistent in popular science, but has been widely frowned upon by the scientific community due to little empirical support. Yet, creativity is believed to rely on the ability to combine remote concepts into novel and useful ideas, an ability which would depend on associative proc...

Orienting biases refer to consistent, trait-like direction of attention or locomotion toward one side of space. Recent studies suggest that such hemispatial biases may determine how well people memorize information presented in the left or right hemifield. Moreover, lesion studies indicate that learning rewarded stimuli in one hemispace depends on...

Social exclusion causes emotional “pain” which activates brain areas similar to physical pain. Evidence suggests social pain can cause hyper-/hypo-sensitivity to physical pain, yet exactly their interaction is poorly understood. We investigated how the perception of physical pain is modulated by preceding social pain in 21 borderline personality di...

Some individuals are better at learning about rewarding situations, whereas others are inclined to avoid punishments (i. e., enhanced approach or avoidance learning, respectively). In reinforcement learning, action values are increased when outcomes are better than predicted (positive prediction errors [PEs]) and decreased for worse than predicted...