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Cooperative phenotype predicts climate change belief and pro-environmental behaviour

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Atkinson,  Quentin Douglas
Linguistic and Cultural Evolution, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Max Planck Society;

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Citation

Kelly, D., Claessens, S., Sibley, C. G., Chaudhuri, A., & Atkinson, Q. D. (2021). Cooperative phenotype predicts climate change belief and pro-environmental behaviour. PsyArXiv Preprints, qu7v4. doi:10.31234/osf.io/qu7v4.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0008-F821-B
Abstract
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.