%0 Report
%A Kelly, Daniel
%A Claessens, Scott
%A Sibley, Chris G
%A Chaudhuri, Ananish
%A Atkinson, Quentin Douglas
%+ Linguistic and Cultural Evolution, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Max Planck Society
%T Cooperative phenotype predicts climate change belief and pro-environmental behaviour : 
%G eng
%U https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0009-1D85-1
%R 10.31234/osf.io/qu7v4
%D 2021
%8 25.07.2021
%Z Review method: no-review
%X Understanding the psychological causes of variation in climate change belief and pro-environmental behaviour remains an urgent challenge for the social sciences. The “cooperative phenotype” is a stable psychological preference for cooperating in social dilemmas that involve a tension between individual and collective interest. Since climate change poses a social dilemma on a global scale, this issue may evoke similar psychological processes as smaller social dilemmas. Here, we investigate the relationships between the cooperative phenotype and climate change belief and behaviour with a representative sample of New Zealanders (n = 897). By linking behaviour in a suite of economic games to self-reported climate attitudes, we show robust positive associations between the cooperative phenotype and both climate change belief and pro-environmental behaviour. Furthermore, our mediation analyses support a motivated reasoning model in which the relationship between the cooperative phenotype and pro-environmental behaviour is fully mediated by climate change belief. These findings suggest that common psychological mechanisms underlie cooperation in both micro-scale social dilemmas and larger-scale social dilemmas like climate change.
%K climate change belief, cooperation, motivated reasoning, pro-environmental behaviour
%Z Results and discussions
Methods
- Power analysis
- Participants and sampling
- Materials
- Procedure
- Statistical analyses
%J PsyArXiv 
%Z sequence number: qu7v4