Huge thanks to my fantastic co-authors for this collaboration! @clauslamm.bsky.social @sabinepahl.bsky.social @lei-zhang.bsky.social @lukaslengersdorff.bsky.social @jonasnitschke.bsky.social @kimdoell.bsky.social
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📂 All materials (code, data, task scripts) are fully open to support transparency and future research!

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🔹 Individuals who invested more effort/time for the environment in the task were also more likely to support costly climate policies.
🔹 Climate beliefs alone did not reliably predict willingness to incur real behavioural costs — highlighting a gap between belief and costly action.
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🔹 People are consistently less willing to incur costs for pro-environmental outcomes than for self-benefitting ones.
🔹 Computational modelling showed that effort is discounted parabolically and time hyperbolically, suggesting distinct motivational mechanisms.
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Across two incentivized behavioural tasks, we examined how people weigh time and effort when deciding whether to act for themselves or for the environment. We found that:
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Huge thanks to leads @drjocutler.bsky.social, Luis Sebastian Contreras-Huerta, @brainapps.bsky.social & @thepsychologist.bsky.social and everyone else involved @clauslamm.bsky.social @jonasnitschke.bsky.social @scanunit.bsky.social and more!

🚨 The PEET and all materials for using it and analyzing the data are publicly available!

You can download it and implement it directly in Qualtrics to test your own research questions:
👉 osf.io/zv2tu/

We're also thrilled to introduce the Pro-Environmental Effort Task (PEET) 🌱

It’s an incentivized, effort-based task that independently varies effort and reward, comparing people’s effort for a climate cause to a matched non-climate cause.

💡 The two interventions with the strongest and most consistent effects were:
1️⃣ Reducing the psychological distance of climate change
2️⃣ Framing climate action as patriotic and protecting our shared way of life

Both meaningfully boosted motivation to put effort for the climate.