Project title: "The neurocomputational basis of pro-environmental vs self-benefitting behavior".

Project team/partners: Boryana Todorova, Claus Lamm, Paul Forbes, Lei Zhang (SCAN-Unit) in collaboration with Sabine Pahl (Environmental Psychology).

Department: Department of Cognition, Emotion, and Methods in Psychology.

Goal of the project: We want to investigate how the required time and effort for acting pro-environmentally influences people's willingness to do so, as well as how does this relate to individual's climate change beliefs. Additionally, we want to investigate which neurocomputational mechanisms underlie the decision-making processes.

Why is this important and useful? The goal of the current project is to gain a better understanding of pro-environmental behavior so we can foster it better. To do so, we are combining interdisciplinary methods from both cognitive neuroscience and environmental psychology.

Abstract: Reduction of the greenhouse gas emissions is the single most crucial factor for mitigating climate change. Many actions related to reducing one's own emissions are time-consuming and effortful (e.g. walking instead of taking the car, switching to a green energy supplier, etc.). However, we know surprisingly little about how the amount of time and effort required for acting pro-environmentally influences the likelihood to do so, as well as what happens in the brain when we have to decide whether to act pro-environmentally or not. Besides the time and effort required, other important factors are people's climate change beliefs. Despite widespread agreement that climate change is happening many people do not act sustainably on daily basis. We want to investigate how time and effort influence the gap between knowing and acting and test interventions aimed at reducing it.

Explanation - easy to understand: Acting pro-environmentally often takes more time and effort than not doing so. For example, actions such as recycling, switching your energy supplier, walking instead of driving require both time and effort. We want to find out how the time and effort required reduce people's willingness to act pro-environmentally. And how that relates to people's climate change attitudes by investigating people's behaviors and their brains.