Ash Gillis’s scientific contributions

Political polarization is a barrier to enacting policy solutions to global issues. Social psychology has a rich history of studying polarization, and there is an important opportunity to refine and define its contributions to the present political realities. We do so in the context of one of the most pressing modern issues: climate change. We synthesize the literature on political polarization and its applications to climate change, and we propose lines of further research and intervention design. We focus on polarization in the United States, examining other countries when literature is available. The polarization literature emphasizes two types of mechanisms: individual-level psychological processes related to political ideology and group-level psychological processes related to partisan identification. We highlight the potential intervention strategies of circumventing solution aversion, leveraging superordinate identities, correcting misperceived norms, and having trusted experts and politicians communicate about climate change. Interventions that address group-level processes can be more effective than those that address individual-level processes. These areas of research and intervention development are particularly important given that behavioral interventions grounded in scientific research are one of our most promising tools to achieve the behavioral wedge we need to address climate change and to make progress on other policy issues.