Psychological barriers to improving carbon competence

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Provides empirical evidence on cognitive biases in carbon perception, useful for designing behavior change interventions.

🏢実務担当者:Offers insights for corporate sustainability communication and product labeling to better engage consumers.

🏛政策担当者:Informs policy design for public awareness campaigns and carbon labeling schemes.

Abstract To effectively contribute to the mitigation of climate change, individuals require accurate representations of the greenhouse gas emissions related to climate actions across life domains. Although this carbon competence is generally low, the related psychological barriers remain largely unexplored, and few attempts have been made to improve it. Here we investigate how heuristic and motivated reasoning processes relate to mitigation potential estimates and evaluate corrective interventions. Across three preregistered studies ( n total = 2,924) we show that low- to medium-impact actions are more frequently adopted than higher-impact actions, and that knowledge about the differential impact of climate actions is limited. Our data suggest that inaccuracies are driven by individuals consistently relying on the availability heuristic and motivated reasoning to form their judgements. To address this, we identify perceived behavioural costs and social prevalence as reasonable proxies of the actual impact of a broad range of climate actions. Leveraging this insight in two corrective boosting interventions and informing about the most impactful climate actions only partly improved impact estimates, with considerable variations across individuals. Accounting for heterogeneity through tailored interventions appears crucial to overcome pervasive psychological barriers to carbon competence on a large scale.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-026-01900-0first seen 2026-08-05 04:58:50