Climate actions from individual to collective

Speaker

Cameron Brick, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

Scientific Coordinator: Andrea Bizzego

Abstract

My research group in social and environmental psychology focuses on the motivations and social processes that affect environmental behaviors such as reducing meat consumption, flying, voting, and protesting. I will frame the talk with our recent Perspective calling for more effective behavioral science for climate mitigation, and propose recommendations for future research. The talk will focus on how pro-environmental behavior is conceptualized and measured. Most previous studies assumed that pro-environmental behavior is a coherent psychological variable, but recent work suggests behaviors are not person characteristics (are not mental constructs) and are quite diverse. Consistent with this, recent findings suggest the behavior measures correlate weakly and have distinct causes.

Bio

Cameron Brick is an Assistant Professor of Social Psychology with tenure and he supervises a research group in Environmental Psychology at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. The group studies how individuals react to collective problems such as climate change, and uses surveys and experiments to predict behavior from beliefs, identities, demographics, and social context.