Elsevier

Current Opinion in Psychology

Volume 42, December 2021, Pages 82-88
Current Opinion in Psychology

Review
Motivation and climate change: A review

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.04.001Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Abstract

This paper reviews motivations people experience about climate change and integrates recent findings into the BUCkET model of core social goals. We argue that environmentalism is not the main cause of thoughts or behaviors about climate change. Rather, the evolved social needs for Belongingness, Understanding, Control, self-Enhancement, and Trust are more practical intervention targets than the attempt to create environmentalist beliefs or identities. We used database searches to identify the key research areas on motivation and climate change and synthesized articles into the BUCkET model. This reveals some limiting assumptions of previous approaches and suggests the effectiveness of targeting existing motives rather than fostering new values or worldviews.

Keywords

Environmentalism
Proenvironmental behavior
Prosociality
Knowledge deficit model
Attitude-behavior gap
Motivation

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