Seeing Is Believing: - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

Seeing Is Believing:
Comprensión & Aiding Human
Responses to Global Climate Change

Elke U. Weber

This essay traces my academic voyage from studying human perceptions of finan-
cial risk to the realization that the human response to climate change is a more fun-
damental and profound challenge. Along the way, I came to realize that different
academic disciplines need to be recruited for two purposes: 1) to tell an accurate
story about the motivations and processes by which environmental (and other) de-
cisions get made by stakeholders that range from policy-makers in the public and
private sector to the general public; y 2) to determine and implement effective
and feasible ways of changing the physical, institutional, and social environment
to help myopic decision-makers achieve long(es)-term objectives. I see my voyage as
an exercise in applied hope, resisting the constraints that disciplines and academia
try to place on scholars and helping others to do so as well, by both example and
institution-building.

Be neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Both are different forms of
fatalism. En cambio, practice what I call applied hope: believe our world
and the causes you care about can get better, and work to make them so.

—Amory Lovins1

T his is the intellectual puzzle of our time: what lies at the root of pervasive

inaction, ilusiones, and denial in the face of global climate change,
a hazard with potentially catastrophic consequences for the continued
habitation of the human species on planet Earth? In this essay, I trace my aca-
demic voyage from studying human perceptions of financial risk to the realization
that the human response to climate change is a more fundamental and profound
challenge. Climate change shares all the characteristics that make wise respond-
ing hard in other individual and societal problem settings, from insufficient re-
tirement savings to the opioid epidemic and obesity, but more so. On this personal
trajectory, I came to realize that different academic disciplines need to be recruit-
ed for two purposes: 1) to tell an accurate story about the motivations and process-

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es by which environmental (and other) decisions get made by stakeholders that
range from policy-makers in the public and private sector to the general public;
y 2) to determine and implement effective and feasible ways of changing the
físico, institutional, and social environment to help myopic decision-makers
achieve long(es)-term objectives. Stops along this voyage will revisit the estab-
lishment of an interdisciplinary center that created a new area of research and will
describe the rewards and challenges of leaving the comfort zone of one’s academ-
ic discipline and of actively translating and exporting academic insights for use in
the proverbial “real world.”

Academic writing typically does not happen in the first person singular, pero
the invitation to bear witness on climate change as an academic and societal chal-
lenge suggests a personal as well as a professional account. I take this opportunity
to reflect back on the journey that has brought me to this juncture of addressing
the intellectual puzzle of our time described above: Why is it that the well-docu-
mented threats of global and potentially catastrophic climate change do not move
national governments, corporations, or large segments of civil society to more
fully consider mitigative or even protective action? Why is it or how is it that so
many of us prefer to engage in the wishful thinking and denial of inconvenient
facts that may well imperil the comfortable existence of future generations of the
human species on planet Earth?

I started on my academic path with Ph.D. research at Harvard’s program on

behavior and decision analysis within the department of psychology and, por
my own initiative, at Harvard Business School, modeling and empirically in-
vestigating people’s perceptions of risk, mostly in the context of risky financial
investment decisions. Serendipity, in my first faculty position in quantitative psy-
chology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, led me to a group of
agricultural economists who were interested in studying awareness about and ac-
tions in the face of potential climate change among farmers in East Central Illi-
nois. I joined the team as someone with expertise in interviews and surveys and,
through the research, discovered the first instantiation of what I later came to call
the single-action bias: a saber, the tendency of people (en este caso, farmers) OMS
are responding to a threat to rely on a single action when other actions exist, incluso
when the single action provides only incremental risk reduction and may not even
be the most effective option.2 My senior colleague at Carnegie Mellon University,
Baruch Fischhoff, one of the few psychologists at the time interested in applying
psychological theory to solve real-world problems (and a long-standing role mod-
el and mentor), learned about my foray into climate change research and would
pass my name on to National Research Council committees and other organiza-
tions looking for a psychologist with expertise and interest in the topic, whenever
he could not or did not want to take on an invitation. By contributing to reports

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like those written by social and environmental scientist Paul Stern and geoscien-
tist Bill Easterling, I learned to appreciate the value that interdisciplinary collab-
orations between the physical and social sciences as well as across different social
and behavioral sciences bring to the challenges of climate change action.3

This essay is a welcome opportunity to take stock of the fundamental insights
about climate change perceptions and action that I arrived at over these past
thirty- five years. Here are my top three: 1) climate change does not elicit sufficient
fear or dread; 2) motivating climate action through fear or guilt is a bad idea even
though it might sound like an effective approach; y 3) we need to help people
recognize their personal experience of the concrete impacts of climate change on
their lives, though this is easier said than done and may not work for everyone.

My first insight, that climate change does not elicit sufficient fear or dread
to motivate action, not surprisingly builds on the foundational work by Baruch
Fischhoff and his colleagues Paul Slovic and Sarah Lichtenstein on psychologi-
cal risk dimensions. I put this insight forth as a hypothesis fifteen years ago at a
meeting at Princeton organized by geoscientist Michael Oppenheimer, expect-
ing others to put it to the test.4 Eventually, one of my Ph.D. students took the bait
and set out to replicate and expand the classic Lichtenstein and colleagues study
on psychological risk dimensions, which now also included climate change, glob-
al warming, and a list of extreme weather events and natural disasters known to
be exacerbated in frequency or intensity by climate change.5 As predicted, peo-
ple’s perceptions of the composite “dread” variable for climate change (or global
calentamiento, the label for the hazard did not matter) were far below the average for
all hazards, while the perhaps more concrete extreme weather events or natural
disasters scored high.

This suggests that it would not be easy to motivate climate action by fear,
since climate change does not elicit visceral responses of dread. But even if cli-
mate change were dreaded, would it be a good idea to use this fear or the guilt of
not contributing to a solution as a motivator for action? My second theoretical
and empirical insight suggests that the answer to this question is no, given that
effective climate change action requires sustained attention and action over time.
Negative messaging that elicits fear or guilt gets attention, but people want to get
out of the negative mood state quickly because it is unpleasant, leading among
other things to the single-action bias mentioned earlier, where the fear-motivat-
ed flag for action goes down after the first protective or corrective action is taken.
Positive messaging and information about a way forward, por otro lado, son
far more effective motivators for the long haul. One particularly effective positive
emotion is pride. Campaigns that make people anticipate the pride of being part
of the solution (rather than the guilt of being part of the problem) have proven to
be a far better strategy, both in controlled tests in the lab and in field settings that
range from the conservation of birds in the Caribbean and fisheries in the Philip-

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149 (4) Fall 2020Elke U. Weber

pines by the NGO Rare.org to the preservation of coral reefs with the help of cane
farmers in Queensland, Australia, by the company Evidn.6 I have been impressed
by both of these organizations with whom I have had the opportunity to interact
for the way in which they have been putting behavioral science principles to good
usar.

My third insight relates to the fact that personal experience is a powerful
maestro, far more convincing than pallid statistics, even if the latter carry greater
evidentiary value.7 This insight is alluded to in the title of this essay: “Seeing Is Be-
lieving.” But as is often true in psychology (not a logically consistent and internal-
ly coherent social science discipline like economics), the opposite can also be the
caso: a saber, that “believing is seeing.” In other words, people are often commit-
ted to their beliefs, especially when those beliefs are visibly and vocally shared by
others in their tribe, and will selectively attend to information that confirms those
beliefs and fail to see evidence that contradicts them. Este, por supuesto, explains the
increasing polarization of climate change beliefs.8

B uilding bridges and commuting on those bridges between continents and

academic disciplines has been a strong metaphor in my life, from living
and working in some form or other in both North America (Canada and
the United States) and Europe, to trying to draw on, reconcile, and integrate the-
oretical frameworks and empirical tools from psychology, economics, and oth-
er behavioral disciplines. “Combine and conquer,” a phrase I coined in 1984, tiene
been an epistemic theme in my work, a call to arms and part of the title of more
than one paper.9 It reflects my belief that multiple academic disciplines are need-
ed to understand the motivations and processes by which environmental deci-
sions get made by actors that include the general public as well as professional
decision-makers. Contrary to the prevalent implicit assumption in policy circles,
not all decisions are made solely by rational deliberation, but also involve emo-
tional reactions and, frequently, the implicit or explicit application of rules (semejante
as standard-operating procedures, best practices, and moral or ethical rules of
conduct) that follow from people’s social or professional identity.10 People have
many and often conflicting goals, and preferences are not the primitive they are
assumed to be in economics, but often get constructed in real time and thus are
influenced by the subset of goals that are activated by the physical and social en-
vironment in which the decision is being made.11 Cultural environments vary in
the chronic activation levels that different goals have through pervasive prompts
that range from nursery rhymes to proverbs, advertisements, and spoken and un-
spoken social norms that communicate long-standing shared values.12 But across
all cultures, boundedly rational humans with limited attention and processing ca-
pacity are paying more attention to goals that are close in physical and psychologi-
cal space and time, suggesting that attention to longer-term objectives needs to be

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actively primed and solicited.13 The fact that our preferences are often construct-
ed also suggests that they can and may change. This is an important fact to know
for politicians and other elected officials, who may govern by opinion polls rath-
er than proposing climate (and other policies) that increase public welfare and
achieve long(es)-term sustainability and social equity objectives, for fear of their
chances for re-election. There is evidence that initially unpopular policies (como
el 2009 carbon tax by the Canadian provincial government of British Columbia
y el 2002 smoking ban in public places by New York City) can become popular
within one or two years of their implementation, suggesting that public opinion
can be educated by evidence of the benefits of change and that status quo bias can
be a transient phenomenon.14 The current COVID-19 crisis shows that paternal-
ism need not be a dirty word. Crisis situations call for leadership and tough love
on the part of public policy-makers, where actions that are in the long-term public
interest may need to and should be mandated for the benefit of all.

L ast we looked at the physical trajectory of my career, I was at the Univer-

sity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. My three years there were followed
by seven years at the University of Chicago and then four very productive
and enjoyable years at the Ohio State University. A new marriage then brought
me to Columbia University and its Earth Institute in 1999, where I founded the
Center for Decision Sciences with my colleague Eric Johnson and then, en 2002,
as an offshoot, the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED) con
my colleague David Krantz. CRED came into existence as the result of a National
Science Foundation solicitation for interdisciplinary social science collaborations
that would address climate change perceptions, creencias, and actions, funded by
the George W. Bush administration as an excuse to delay ratification of the Kyoto
agreement (“more research” was first needed on climate change). CRED reversed
the usual way in which the physical and climate sciences and the behavioral sci-
ences cooperated: instead of the climate sciences playing the central role and the
behavioral sciences being recruited toward the end in (solo) a supporting capac-
ity to help craft climate change communications, CRED put psychology, anthro-
pology, and behavioral economics center stage for their theories and methods, como-
sisted by input from the climate sciences as needed. In the process of doing so,
CRED helped to create a new interdisciplinary subdiscipline called environmen-
tal decision-making, now being pursued in other places around the country and
el mundo. CRED’s lessons and takeaways were translated into an accessible and
actionable format from the numerous academic publications that its research-
ers generated to two Climate Change Communication Guides, one published in
2009 and an update and expansion published in conjunction with ecoAmerica in
2014.15 These publications are being used by a wide range of organizations around
el pais, such as the Central Park Zoo, which uses them to train its volunteer

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149 (4) Fall 2020Elke U. Weber

docents in climate change communication. CRED has trained many Ph.D. estu-
dents and postdocs who have since gone on to academic and applied positions
around the world, a valuable contribution in light of Patrick Kinney’s comment in
this issue of Dædalus about the importance of early training in multidisciplinary
colaboración.

En 2016, I moved to Princeton, where I founded the Behavioral Science for Policy
Lab (BSPL), located in the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment and
bridging to the School for Public and International Affairs, the Department of Ecol-
ogy and Evolutionary Biology, and the Department of Psychology, with Ph.D. estu-
dents and postdocs from across the university. The decision to leave Columbia Uni-
versity and my two centers there was motivated by a desire to expand even further
the range of disciplines, teorías, and tools to be brought to bear on environmen-
tal decision-making and climate change (en)acción. I felt that the field had gotten
a good grasp of the cognitive and motivational barriers to climate action at the in-
dividual actor level and so, in collaboration with the Behavioral Science and Policy
Asociación, I organized an expert summit that prepared an integrative summary of
the behavioral science tools that can improve and strengthen energy and environ-
mental policy.16 At the same time, I felt that this knowledge and resulting efforts to
design interventions to overcome or circumvent barriers to change (“choice archi-
tecture”) was not at all integrated into theories, modelos, and analyses of action at
the social, organizational, and collective level. Some months spent in 2012 on sab-
batical leave to Princeton, with the interdisciplinary research community Commu-
nicating Uncertainty: Ciencia, Instituciones, and Ethics in the Politics of Global Cli-
mate Change at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, had
taught me that I would find invaluable colleagues on that front at Princeton.

For the past four years, my Ph.D. students and postdocs at the BSPL, in col-
laboration with colleagues across Princeton and around the world (at the Stock-
holm Resilience Center, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, y
the University of St. Gallen, among others), have been investigating environmen-
tal and conservation decisions by individuals in their physical and social environ-
mentos, and the decisions made by households, firms, city councils, and other or-
ganizations. We are actively working on bringing in disciplines that better speak
to the role of the physical and social contexts in such decisions, including sociol-
ogy and social network theory, philosophy and social norm theory, and evolution
and ecology and complex adaptive systems theory.

While it has been gratifying to build local centers of research on the questions
of great theoretical and societal importance and to train and cross-train scores of
undergraduate and graduate students and postdocs in the requisite theories and
methods, it has always been obvious to me that the demand for such research,
training, and insights far outstrips the supply. Many (if not most) psychologists,
(behavioral) economists, organization scholars, anthropologists, sociologists,

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and political scientists are more comfortable pursuing discipline-based research
questions that address relatively narrow theoretical or empirical issues than en-
gaging in the time-consuming and often initially challenging efforts to learn and
integrate the vocabulary, frameworks, and methods of neighboring disciplines.
The sad truth is that interdisciplinary research or even disciplinary research de-
signed to address important social issues is currently not highly valued within the
academia, an observation seconded by several other contributors to this volume,
including Rebecca Henderson and Patrick Kinney. What any individual can do to
change this situation so as not to disadvantage young interdisciplinary academics
when they are being considered for promotion and tenure, Por ejemplo, is min-
imal, but I have been trying to do so anyway (among other ways by serving on
bodies like Columbia’s Tenure Review Advisory Committee that advises the pro-
vost on such decisions). This illustrates another long-standing belief of mine: eso
life is a battle between aspiration and hope over realism and despair; and that ac-
tion wins the day, as expressed by Amory Lovins at the beginning of this essay. Alabama-
bert Camus’s “Myth of Sisyphus” tells a similar story, and the sentiment that one
“must imagine Sisyphus happy” has long resonated with me as very true. Pursu-
ing the goals outlined above for their intrinsic value and rewards, against tempo-
rary setbacks but with frequent longer-term victories, has been a rewarding and
largely happy endeavor.

S o what boulders have I tried to roll uphill in an effort to make interdisciplin-

ary research on responses to climate change more appealing and more re-
warding for my students, young colleagues, and future generations? Primero,
I have been trying to lead by example and to show by my own work that funda-
mental psychological theory can be adjudicated and advanced extremely well or
perhaps even better when examined in the context of real-world problems than in
stylized lab settings with abstract content. For me that has resulted in advancing
theory on a variety of issues including risk-taking (risk as feelings, domain- specific
risk-taking, single-action bias), decision modes, and decisions from memory and
experiencia. Segundo, I have been willing to contribute to organizational attempts
to publicize the need for and utility of such efforts: two notable examples have
been the creation of a report by the American Psychological Association about the
role of psychology in addressing the global climate challenge and, more recently,
the creation of an expert panel and resulting report on the role of behavioral sci-
ence in the process of designing (physically and metaphorically) for sustainabil-
idad, organized by the journal Nature Sustainability.17 Third, I have helped create at-
tractive high-profile publication outlets for interdisciplinary research on climate
action in the form of special issues of top journals, in one case, a special issue on
political cognition in Cognition and, in another case, a special issue on the business
of climate change in Management Science.18 The importance of better understand-

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149 (4) Fall 2020Elke U. Weber

ing the ability, willingness, as well as resistance of the business sector to integrate
climate change into its operations, objetivos, and strategic planning is well described
by Rebecca Henderson in her essay in this volume. Addressing corporate climate
change efforts and barriers as well as opportunities for change is high on my lab’s
current agenda.

In my research efforts and center activities described above, I have been keenly
aware of the need not only to generate research insights, but also to get them out
of the ivory tower and into the hands of potential users. I have been trying to do
just that in two ways. One has been an active effort to translate research insights
from the academese of professional journals into the English, Español, or Chinese
spoken by potential audiences of users and published in the form of blog posts
or op-ed pieces. De este modo, academic insights about cognitive myopia and status-quo
bias became op-ed pieces for The Daily Climate and a paper for Argentinian farmers
in their Ag-Extension magazine;19 academic insights about how to promote lon-
ger time horizons in decision-making became an article in The Huffington Post and
a post on the Climate Strategies & Climate Policy Blog;20 and academic insights
about the role of habits in energy use and carbon dioxide emissions became an ar-
ticle in the Chinese Boao Review.21 As a complement to such translation in writing,
I have also been presenting the policy and action implications of this research (mi
own and those of students and colleagues) to professional organizations, ONG,
and governmental and intergovernmental agencies, sometimes at workshops or
invited talks (such as at the UN and the White House), other times by serving on
scientific advisory boards (such as chairing the Green Growth Knowledge Plat-
form of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the UN
Environment Programme, and the World Bank, or serving on the science adviso-
ry boards of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the environmental
NGO Rare). I sometimes refer to these activities as missionary work to promote
recognition of the crucial role that the behavioral sciences (including but notably
beyond economics) can play in the design and effective implementation of poli-
cy. With this mission in mind, I have been serving since 2012 as lead author on the
Fifth and now the Sixth Assessment Report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC), inserting the first mention of nonrational choice pro-
cesses into a chapter on risk management in 2014 and now working on a chapter
on demand-side solutions.22

It is important to demonstrate that complex human responses to climate
change information (eso es, responses that go beyond rational accounting but in-
clude emotion and social elements and biases) are not just encountered among
members of the general public (consumers or voters), but also among profession-
al decision-makers. In this spirit, I have been conducting studies and experiments
in which infrastructure engineers or climate negotiators at the UN Conference of
the Parties are the target populations.23

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Given that our responses to climate change are based on personal experience
and emotional and social responses as much or more than on rational delibera-
ción, I have also attempted to connect and work with boundary organizations that
communicate climate risk information and climate solutions in more experien-
tial ways and in less polarized cultural settings. This has included serving on the
science advisory boards of the Climate Museum in New York City and of UN Live,
the UN Museum for Humanity, and contributing to efforts by artists like the sculp-
tor Olafur Eliasson or to plays like The Great Immensity by The Civilians.24

L eading by example has been another maxim of my life. Doing so in the con-

text of climate action is not always easy. In a project led by a former CRED
postdoc, we show that it matters to members of the American public across
the political spectrum that climate scientists who deliver suggestions for personal
action on climate change in the form of lifestyle changes or policy support “walk
the talk.”25 In a world of multiple goals (with professional obligations to present
work at international conferences, IPCC meetings in far-away locations, and fam-
ily obligations in the form of aging parents in Germany), walking the talk in the
form of changing one’s diet and restricting one’s air travel is not always easy, pero
is an objective that should be given constant attention, an issue also addressed el-
oquently in Jessica Green’s essay in this volume.26

Climate change denial is something all of us engage in to different degrees. De-
nial, like all defense mechanisms, enables us to function and attend to other goals
and objectives when the challenges of climate change seem overwhelming and the
solution space not very feasible. I see similarities to how we deal with knowledge of
our mortality: both are massive problems without obvious easy solutions, where it
makes sense to turn away from the problem at times, as otherwise despair and ni-
hilism may set in. Understanding why and how we turn to different forms of denial
or wishful thinking in both cases can help us think about alternatives. My person-
al alternative has already been alluded to in the opening quote: practicing “applied
hope” in the shape of working to make things better, in my case by researching and
applying (behavioral) science to help design and implement better climate change
policies and responses. Looking back on my professional life has made it apparent
that I really am an engineer at heart, someone who appreciates and uses science, en-
cluding social science, to make things better. En este sentido, it seems very fitting that I
have made the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment my current home,
as it resides in Princeton’s School of Engineering and Applied Science.

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149 (4) Fall 2020Elke U. Weber

Sobre el Autor

Elke U. Weber, miembro de la Academia Americana desde 2016, is the Gerhard R.
Andlinger Professor in Energy and the Environment and Professor of Psychology
and Public Affairs at Princeton University. She has served on advisory committees
of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences related to human dimensions in global
change and has been a lead author in Working Group III for the Fifth and Sixth As-
sessment Reports of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

notas finales

1 Amory Lovins, @AmoryLovins, Twitter, Agosto 26, 2018, https://twitter.com/amory
lovins/status/1033795459712577536 (énfasis añadido). New York Times columnist Thomas
Friedman has helped popularize Lovins’s term, such as in Thomas L. Friedman, “Peres:
93 Years Young,"El New York Times, Septiembre 28, 2016.

2 Elke U. Weber, “Perception and Expectation of Climate Change: Precondition for Eco-
nomic and Technological Adaptation,” in Psychological and Ethical Perspectives to Environmen-
tal and Ethical Issues in Management, ed. Max Bazerman, David Messick, Ann Tenbrunsel,
et al. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997), 314–341.

3 Paul C. Stern and William E. Easterling, editores., Making Climate Forecasts Matter (Washington,

CORRIENTE CONTINUA.: National Academies Press, 1999).

4 Elke U. Weber, “Experience-Based and Description-Based Perceptions of Long-Term
Risk: Why Global Warming Does Not Scare Us (Todavía),” Climatic Change 77 (2006):
103–120.

5 Sarah Lichtenstein, Paul Slovic, Baruch Fischhoff, et al., “Judged Frequency of Lethal
Events,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory 4 (6) (1978): 551–
578; Katherine T. Fox-Glassman, “Natural Hazards and Climate Change as Dread Risk”
(Doctor. diss., Columbia University, 2015); and Katherine T. Fox-Glassman and Elke U.
Weber, “What Makes Risk Acceptable? Revisiting the 1978 Psychological Dimensions
of Perceptions of Technological Risks,” Journal of Mathematical Psychology 75 (2016):
157–169.

6 Hal E. Hershfield and Elke U. Weber, “To Change Environmental Behavior, Should We
Really Tell People the World Is Ending?” The Huffington Post, Septiembre 3, 2013, http://
www.huffingtonpost.com/hal-e-hershfield/to-change-environmental-behavior_b_
3845707.html; Claudia R. Schneider, Lisa Zaval, Elke U. Weber, and Ezra M. Marko-
witz, “The Influence of Anticipated Pride and Guilt on Environmental Decision Mak-
En g,” PLOS One 12 (11) (2017), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0188781; Paul But-
ler, Kevin Green, and Dale Galvin, The Principles of Pride: The Science Behind the Mascots
(Arlington, Va.: Rare, 2013), http://www.rare.org/publications; and “The Queensland
Sugar Cane Industry,” Evidn, https://www.evidn.com/canechanger.

7 Ajita Atreya and Susana Ferreira, “Seeing Is Believing? Evidence from Property Pric-
es in Inundated Areas,” Risk Analysis 35 (5) (2014): 828–848, https://doi.org/10.1111/
risa.12307.

8 I have written on these themes on numerous occasions. See Elke U. Weber, “Doing the
Right Thing Willingly: Behavioral Decision Theory and Environmental Policy,” in The
Behavioral Foundations of Policy, ed. mi. Shafir (Princeton, NUEVA JERSEY.: Prensa de la Universidad de Princeton,

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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesSeeing Is Believing

2013), 380–397; Elke U. Weber, “Climate Change Demands Behavioral Change: Qué
Are the Challenges?” Social Research: An International Quarterly 82 (2015): 561–581; Elke
Ud.. Weber, “Cognitive Science of Political Thought: Some Final Reflections,” Cogni-
ción 188 (2019): 140; and Steven A. Sloman and Elke U. Weber, “The Cognitive Science
of Political Thought: Practical Take-Aways for Political Discourse,” Behavioral Scien-
tist, Octubre 7, 2019, https://behavioralscientist.org/the-cognitive-science-of-political
-thought-practical-takeaways-for-political-discourse/.

9 Elke U. Weber, “Combine and Conquer: A Joint Application of Conjoint and Function-
al Approaches to the Problem of Risk Measurement,” Journal of Experimental Psychology:
Percepción y desempeño humanos 10 (1984): 179–194; and Elke U. Weber, “Combine and
Conquer: A Paean to Methodological Pluralism,” Journal of Applied Research in Memory
and Cognition 7 (2018): 29–32.

10 Elke U. Weber, Daniel R.. Ames, and Ann-Renée Blais, “‘How Do I Choose Thee? Dejar
Me Count the Ways’: A Textual Analysis of Similarities and Differences in Modes of
Decision Making in China and the United States,” Management and Organization Review 1
(2005): 87–118; and Howard Kunreuther, Shreekant Gupta, Valentina Bosetti, et al.,
“Integrated Risk and Uncertainty Assessment of Climate Change Response Policies,"
in Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the
Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed. Ottmar Eden-
hofer, Ramón Pichs-Madruga, Youba Sokona, et al. (Nueva York: Cambridge University
Prensa, 2014).

11 Weber, “Doing the Right Thing Willingly”; and Elke U. Weber and Eric J. Johnson,
“Mindful Judgment and Decision Making,” Annual Review of Psychology 60 (2009): 53–85.

12 Weber et al., “How Do I Choose Thee?"
13 Elke U. Weber, Eric Johnson, Kerry Milch, et al., “Asymmetric Discounting in Intertem-
poral Choice: A Query Theory Account,” Psychological Science 18 (6) (2007): 516–523;
and Hershfield and Weber, To Change Environmental Behavior, Should We Really Tell People the
World Is Ending?

14 Weber, “Climate Change Demands Behavioral Change.”
15 Debika Shome and Sabine Marx, The Psychology of Climate Change Communication: A Guide
for Scientists, Journalists, Educators, Political Aides, and the Interested Public (Nueva York: Cen-
ter for Research on Environmental Decisions, 2009); and Ezra Markowitz, Caroline
Hodge, and Gabriel Harp, Connecting on Climate: A Guide to Effective Climate Change Com-
munication (New York and Washington, CORRIENTE CONTINUA.: Center for Research on Environmental
Decisions and ecoAmerica, 2014).

16 Erez Yoeli, David V. Budescu, Amanda R. Carrico, et al., “Behavioral Science Tools to
Strengthen Energy and Environmental Policy,” Behavioral Science and Policy 3 (1) (2017):
69–79.

17 American Psychological Association Task Force on the Interface between Psychology and
Global Climate Change, Psychology and Global Climate Change: Addressing a Multi- Faceted
Phenomenon and Set of Challenges (Washington, CORRIENTE CONTINUA.: American Psychological Associa-
ción, 2009), http://www.apa.org/science/climate-change/; Elke U. Weber, “How Can
Psychologists Help Make Earth Day Every Day? Behavioral Expert Elke Weber, Ph.D.,
Discusses Psychology and Environmental Protection,” press release, American Psycho-
logical Association, Abril 2013; and Leidy Klotz, John Pickering, Ruth Schmidt, y
Elke U. Weber, “Design Behaviour for Sustainability,” Nature Sustainability 2 (2019).

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149 (4) Fall 2020Elke U. Weber

18 Sloman and Weber, “The Cognitive Science of Political Thought”; Weber, “Cognitive
Science of Political Thought”; Ruth G. Bell and Elke U. Weber, “Opinion: We’re Leav-
ing Too Many Energy Dollars behind Us, on the Ground,” The Daily Climate, Puede 19,
2014; and Tripp Shealy and Elke U. Weber, “Opinion: We Can Build a Better Climate
Solution Today,” The Daily Climate, Noviembre 12, 2014.

19 Bell and Weber, “Opinion: We’re Leaving Too Many Energy Dollars behind Us”; Shealy
and Weber, “Opinion: We Can Build a Better Climate Solution Today”; and Elke U.
Weber, “Objetivos y emociones en la toma de decisión,” Revista CREA, Uso de información
climática: Para la toma de decisiones en la producción agrícola 269 (2003): 7.

20 Hershfield and Weber, “To Change Environmental Behavior, Should We Really Tell Peo-
ple the World Is Ending?"; and Adrian Rinscheid, Silvia Pianta, Elke U. Weber, y
Rolf Wüstenhagen, “On Both Sides of the Atlantic, Voters Want Rapid Action on Cli-
mate Change,” Climate Strategies and Climate Policy Blog, December 17, 2019.

21 Kunreuther et al., “Integrated Risk and Uncertainty Assessment of Climate Change Re-

sponse Policies.”

22 Ibídem.
23 Leidy Klotz, Elke U. Weber, Eric J.. Johnson, et al., “Beyond Rationality in Engineering
Design for Sustainability,” Nature Sustainability 1 (2018): 225–233; Tripp Shealy, Leidy
Klotz, Elke U. Weber, et al., “Bringing Choice Architecture to Architecture and Engi-
neering Decisions: How the Redesign of Rating Systems Can Improve Sustainability,"
Journal of Management in Engineering 35 (4) (2019); and Valentina Bosetti, Elke Weber,
Loïc Berger, et al., “COP21 Climate Negotiators’ Responses to Climate Model Fore-
casts,” Nature Climate Change 7 (2017): 185–191.

24 Elke Weber, Irena Bauman, and Olafur Eliasson, “Can Art Inspire Climate Change Ac-
ción? An Ice Installation Aims to Do Just That,” The Guardian, Octubre 24, 2014, http://
www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2014/oct/23/climate-change-ice-watch
-installation-art-greenland-copenhagen-ipcc; and Elke U. Weber, “A Safe and Magical
Place to Agree and Disagree (About Climate Action),” in Olafur Eliasson–Open House,
volumen. 7 (Berlina: Studio Olafur Eliasson, 2017), 127–130.

25 Shahzeen Z. Attari, David H. Krantz, and Elke U. Weber, “Statements about Climate Re-
searchers’ Carbon Footprints Affect Their Credibility and the Impact of Their Advice,"
Climatic Change 138 (2016): 325–338; and Shahzeen Z. Attari, David H. Krantz, and Elke
Ud.. Weber, “Statements about Climate Researchers’ Carbon Footprints Affect Their Au-
diences’ Policy Support,“Cambio Climático 154 (3) (2019): 529–545.

26 Jessica F. Verde, “Less Talk, More Walk: Why Climate Change Demands Activism in the

Academia,Dédalo 149 (4) (Caer 2020).

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