Tobia Spampatti

• Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at New York University

In popular media, accurate climate information and climate disinformation often coexist and present competing narratives about climate change. As climate disinformation can undermine public support of climate policies and trust in climate science, it is crucial to understand what leads to exposure and acceptance of climate disinformation. Whereas p...

As the predicted impacts of climate change on nature and society worsen, it is essential to not only understand how to communicate climate risks but also how communicating them affects people’s climate-relevant emotions, scientific beliefs, political attitudes, and behavior around the world. Here, we conducted a preregistered secondary analysis of...

Behavioural scientists increasingly assess interventions against misinformation via truth discernment. However, pursuing truth discernment may hinder behaviour change when action is needed, for pandemic response or the climate crisis. The trade-off between discernment, behaviour, and other outcomes should be explicitly studied when evaluating inter...

Competing hypotheses exist on how conservative political ideology is associated with susceptibility to misinformation. We performed a secondary analysis of responses from 1,721 participants from twelve countries in a study that investigated the effects of climate disinformation and six psychological interventions to protect participants against suc...

Behavioural scientists increasingly assess interventions against misinformation via truth discernment. However, pursuing truth discernment may hinder behaviour change when action is needed, for pandemic response or the climate crisis. The trade-off between discernment, behaviour, and other outcomes should be explicitly studied when evaluating inter...

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...

In a world barreling down into a worsening climate crisis, negative persuasive attacks to necessary climate policies are major threats to the public's support of governmental mandates to mitigate climate change. To protect against such attacks, here we introduce and investigate the effect and the treatment heterogeneity of the trust inoculation, a...

Decades after the scientific debate about the anthropogenic causes of climate change was settled, climate disinformation still challenges the scientific evidence in public discourse. Here we present a comprehensive theoretical framework of (anti)science belief formation and updating to account for the psychological factors that influence the accept...

Psychological inoculations are hailed as one of the most promising evidence-based techniques to preemptively protect public support against negative information and events, especially in time-sensitive domains like climate change mitigation and energy transitions. However, field testing of these techniques is limited, and their ecological validity...

Actions to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis are urgently needed but face societal inertia due to decades of climate disinformation and discourses of policy delay. Behavioral science research has the potential to develop evidence-based strategies to fight disinformation; however, this research has not been conducted systematically nor with v...

Psychological inoculations are hailed as one of the most promising evidence-based techniques to preemptively protect public support against negative information and events, especially in time-sensitive domains like climate mitigation and energy transitions. However, field testing of these techniques is limited, and their ecological validity thus re...

Positive perception of renewable energy systems, including shallow geothermal systems, is essential for a sustainable energy transition. However, it is underexplored how citizens’ feelings towards and evaluations of this technology change over time and consolidate into a stable, positive perception. In an online longitudinal experiment in Western S...

Negative persuasive attacks and misinformation are major threats to public support of governmental mandates. Here, we introduce and investigate the treatment heterogeneity of the trust inoculation, first of a new kind of sociopsychological inoculation designed around the social dimensions of persuasion to protect against negative persuasive attacks...

The transition towards more renewable energy will substantially increase voters’ involvement in the political decision-making process in the energy domain. Decisions such as whether to approve or reject large-scale energy programs can be complex, especially when available information cues are numerous and conflicting. Here, we hypothesize that poli...