Climate beliefs across borders: National patterns and digital interventions

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• Matthew Hornsey (University of Queensland)
• Monday 09 June 2025, 15:00-16:00
• Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Department of Psychology, Downing Site, Cambridge.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Yara Kyrychenko.

Like many social psychologists, I began my career thinking about the individual; how worldviews, ideologies, and belief systems shape people’s responses to climate change. Most of this work has been rooted in the Global North, where political ideology and education are often central. But climate change (in)action is not easily explained at the level of the individual. Rather, it’s a global phenomenon shaped by national histories, economies, and political systems. In this talk, I shift focus from the individual to the national level, drawing on international datasets, social media data, and machine learning to explore how country-level factors — such as GDP , fossil fuel dependence, and democracy — shape climate concern, scepticism, and activism. The findings underscore calls for a globally informed approach to climate psychology, one that takes seriously the political, economic, and structural context in which beliefs are formed. Finally, the talk turns to the dual role of artificial intelligence in this space, both as a vector for amplifying climate-related misinformation and as a tool for enhancing trust and promoting accurate scientific communication. I explore recent work testing AI-facilitated interventions to reduce conspiracy theories and misinformation about climate science and renewable energy, interventions that are potentially scalable to international contexts.

This talk is part of the Social Psychology Seminar Series (SPSS) series.

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