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Leveraging social cognition to promote effective climate change mitigation

Nature Climate Change volume 12, pages 332–338 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Effective climate change mitigation is a social dilemma: the benefits are shared collectively but the costs are often private. To solve this dilemma, we argue that we must pay close attention to the nature and workings of human cooperation. We review three social cognition mechanisms that regulate cooperation: norm detection, reputation management and fairness computation. We show that each of these cognitive mechanisms can stand in the way of pro-environmental behaviours and limit the impact of environmental policies. At the same time, the very same mechanisms can be leveraged as powerful solutions for an effective climate change mitigation.

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Fig. 1: Policymakers can leverage reputation management to promote pro-environmental behaviours by making them more observable.

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Acknowledgements

This research was made possible by the French Agence National de la Recherche (grant no. ANR-17-EURE- 0017).

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  1. Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives et Computationnelles, Département d’Études Cognitives, École Normale Supérieure, PSL University, INSERM, Paris, France

    Mélusine Boon-Falleur, Aurore Grandin & Coralie Chevallier

  2. Institut Jean Nicod, Département d’Études Cognitives, École Normale Supérieure, PSL University, EHESS, CNRS, Paris, France

    Nicolas Baumard

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M.B.-F. and C.C. had the original idea for the Review. M.B.-F., A.G., N.B. and C.C. wrote the paper.

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Boon-Falleur, M., Grandin, A., Baumard, N. et al. Leveraging social cognition to promote effective climate change mitigation. Nat. Clim. Chang. 12, 332–338 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-022-01312-w

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