Talbot Andrews

University of Connecticut | UConn · Department of Political Sciences

Some technologies, such as solar or wind power, create certain but relatively small reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Others, such as carbon sequestration devices, have larger potential upsides, but a greater possibility of failure. Here we show using economic games that people will invest in high-risk high-reward technologies when more certa...

Feeling affected by climate change related disasters has the potential to mobilize belief in climate change, concern about the issue, and support for mitigation policies – even when accounting for the effects of physically living through a disaster. In this study we use a two-wave survey design where respondents in the United States were interviewe...

Many people want the government involved in healthcare. Is this because citizens are concerned about their own vulnerability, the plight of vulnerable others, or both? To test for these concerns, we used representative surveys and experimental economic games. We found robust evidence for concern for others. In surveys, people who worried about vuln...

While people are surprisingly cooperative in social dilemmas, cooperation is fragile to the emergence of defection. Punishment is a key mechanism through which people sustain cooperation, but when are people willing to pay the costs to punish? Using data from existing work on punishment in public goods games conducted in industrialized countries th...

Myopia involves giving disproportionate weight to outcomes that occur close to the present. Myopia in people’s evaluations of political outcomes and proposals threatens effective policymaking. It can lead to inefficient spending just before elections, cause inaction on important future policy challenges, and create incentives for government interve...

Highlighting the local impacts of climate change has the potential to increase the public’s awareness of and engagement with climate change. However, information about local impacts is only effective when delivered by trusted sources such as copartisan political leaders. Is information about climate change conveyed by local media sources similarly...

This article provides a stocktake of the adaptation literature between 2013 and 2019 to better understand how adaptation responses affect risk under the particularly challenging conditions of compound climate events. Across 39 countries, 45 response types to compound hazards display anticipatory (9%), reactive (33%) and maladaptive (41%) characteri...

Effectively responding to intensifying climate change hazards requires identifying risks arising from each response, as well as risks arising from the dynamic interactions between responses. Using examples of managed retreat and solar geoengineering, we illustrate the importance of understanding response as a determinant of climate change risk. We...

This article provides a stocktake the adaptation literature between 2013 and 2019 to better understand how responses affect risk under the particularly challenging conditions of compound climate impacts. Across 39 countries, 45 response types to compound hazards display anticipatory (9%), reactive (33%) and maladaptive characteristics (41%), as wel...

Declining trust in government is often cited as the cause of declining support for policies that require ideological sacrifices. Yet pivotal to the effect of trust is the broader political context, which can vary over time. In a context of deep partisan divisions, for individuals who do not trust the government, even small ideological costs can sig...

Geoengineering is sometimes touted as a partial solution to climate change but will only be successful in conjunction with other mitigation strategies. This creates a potential for a “moral hazard”: If people think geoengineering alone will mitigate climate change, they may become overly optimistic and reduce support for other necessary mitigation...

What are the most effective messages to mobilize individuals to engage in climate change mitigation behaviors? One common strategy is to tell individuals about many easy ways they can get involved. However, psychological theories of choice suggest this communication strategy might backfire: when presented with too many options, people become less l...

Climate change literacy encompasses being aware of both climate change and its anthropogenic cause, and thus underpins informed mitigation and adaptation responses. However, climate change literacy rates and their predictors remain poorly understood across the Global South. Here analysis of Africa’s largest representative public opinion survey show...

People support inefficient spending on preventing disasters, and these preferences are translated into inefficient policies as elected officials try to appeal to their constituents. Here, we find preferences for prevention spending are biased by the “cost conflation” mechanism, where people assume expensive problems have expensive solutions. In thi...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessments (IPCC) Special Report on 1.5°C of global warming is clear. Nearly all pathways that hold global warming well below 2°C involve carbon removal (IPCC, 2015). In addition, solar geoengineering is being considered as a potential tool to offset warming, especially to limit temperature until negat...

Disaster responses are political. But can citizens make useful disaster decisions? Potential obstacles are that such decisions are complex, involve public goods, and often affect other people. Theories of political decision-making disagree on whether these problems can be overcome. We used experimental economic games that simulate disaster to test...

While the conflict literature has examined the use of forced recruitment in conflict, the question remains why groups would choose to do so when forced recruits require expensive coercion and time intensive socialization processes. The prevailing wisdom in the literature is that forced recruitment is a tactic of the weak; yet empirically, we often...

Feeling affected by climate change related natural disasters is an important predictor of engaging in climate change mitigation behavior. We therefore collected data to identify who felt affected by Hurricane Florence, which made landfall in the United States on September 14th, 2018. In the months before Hurricane Florence, we collected survey resp...

De Dreu and Gross's distinction between attack and defense is complicated in real-world conflicts because competing leaders construe their position as one of defense, and power imbalances place status quo challengers in a defensive position. Their account of defense as vigilant avoidance is incomplete because it avoids a reference to anger which tr...

Boyer & Petersen (B&P) lay out a compelling theory for folk-economic beliefs, focusing on beliefs about markets. However, societies also allocate resources through mechanisms involving power and group decision-making (e.g., voting), through the political economy. We encourage future work to keep folk political economic beliefs in mind, and sketch a...

Women's body attractiveness is influenced by specific anthropometric cues, including body mass index (BMI), waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), waist-to-stature ratio (WSR), and shoulder-to-waist ratio (SWR). Despite the existence of multiple functional hypotheses to explain these preferences, it remains unclear which cue-based inferences are most influentia...