Originally published on May 27, 2025 by Sarah DeWeerdt for Anthropocene Magazine.
A new study looks systematically for what works—and what doesn’t—to overcome psychological barriers that keep people stuck in the carbon-emissions status quo.
Getting people to think more about the future, especially their own and that of people they care about, is the most effective way to motivate climate action, according to a new study. The findings come from a head-to-head test of a 17 different strategies to inspire people to fight climate change, ranging from viewing information about carbon footprints to brainstorming the personal benefits of environmentally friendly actions.
In the past, most studies of such strategies just tested one intervention at a time to see whether or not it worked. But this made it hard to compare results across studies. Now, researchers are starting to look systematically to find out not just what works but what works best to overcome psychological barriers that keep people stuck in the carbon-emissions status quo.
The new study is an example of an “intervention tournament,” an emerging study design in which a multiplicity of climate interventions are all tested at the same time using the same methodology. Researchers recruited 7,624 adults living in the United States for an online study. They randomly assigned each participant to one of 17 intervention groups or a control group. Each intervention group tested a different psychological strategy to motivate climate action.
To measure the effectiveness of the interventions, the researchers asked participants how often they engage in various climate-related actions, whether they planned to do so more or less often in the future, and how beneficial they thought it would be if many people engaged in the action. Participants also viewed 5 headlines and 3 petitions about climate change and were asked how likely they were to share the information both broadly on social media and directly with people they know.
“We found that guiding people to imagine the future of climate change, especially scenarios that involved oneself and close others, was the most effective way to motivate action,” says study team member Alyssa Sinclair, a postdoctoral researcher in the Communication Neuroscience Lab and the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Such future-oriented interventions include imagining oneself experiencing negative effects of climate change in the future, and writing a letter to a child about one’s efforts to secure a livable planet for that child to read as an adult.
“Prompting people to relate climate change to themselves and people they care about was the most effective way to motivate sharing news and petitions about climate change,” Sinclair adds. This could be done, for example, through the letter to a child or through an exercise in which participants were asked to describe why news headlines on climate change were relevant to them or people they know.
The findings appear in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Interventions that aimed to increase people’s appreciation of the effectiveness of climate actions achieved this goal, although they did not actually inspire action itself – a surprising result, Sinclair says. “In prior surveys, we found that perceived impact was associated with intentions to engage in actions that are good for the environment,” she explains. “These results suggest that although increasing perceived impact may be helpful, it’s not always necessary or sufficient for motivating action.”
The researchers also identified interventions that are ineffective at inspiring action or information sharing, notably providing information about one’s personal carbon footprint – despite this being a frequent strategy for climate communication.
Writing a letter to a child also emerged as an effective strategy in another recent intervention tournament, which tested 11 different climate action interventions across 63 countries. In that study, the letter writing was even effective for people on the political right in the U.S., who tend to be skeptical about climate change and climate action.
In the new study, all participants were people who affirm the existence and human cause of climate change, a stance associated with the political left in the U.S. “In ongoing studies, we are further exploring promising interventions that are effective for both liberals and conservatives,” Sinclair reports. The researchers are also testing ways to measure the effects of interventions not just on people’s intentions but on their everyday behavior.
Source: Sinclair A.H. et al. “Behavioral interventions motivate action to address climate change.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2025.
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