“Climate change is a threat to human well-being and planetary health. There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.”

— Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2023

My research program integrates social psychological theory with large-scale behavioral science methods to identify, test, and translate effective strategies for motivating collective action on climate change. I address a core challenge in social psychology: how to change beliefs and behaviors in politically polarized, emotionally charged, and globally diverse contexts.

I started my Ph.D. at NYU in 2022, supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. I am a member of Dr. Jay Van Bavel's Center for Conflict and Cooperation at NYU and Dr. Madalina Vlasceanu's Climate Cognition Lab at Stanford.

Learn more about my experience on my CV.

Research Overview

My research asks what makes collective action feel worth doing. I study climate action at three levels (individual behavior, collective advocacy, and systemic policy support) to understand which psychological mechanisms drive different forms of engagement.

Across this work, I focus on three recurring levers: efficacy (does this work?), identity and morality (does this feel like who we are?), and emotion (what does action feel like?). Using large-scale experiments, megastudies, and policy-focused field research, I test which interventions most effectively motivate action under real-world collective dilemmas.

Individual: Personal Behavior

At the individual level, I study whether people are willing to change their own lifestyle and consumption choices. This work shows that people often misjudge which personal actions matter most for climate impact, and that improving climate action literacy can shift commitments toward higher-impact behaviors.

At the same time, this work also reveals an important limit: when interventions focus only on individual lifestyle actions, willingness to engage in collective actions such as voting or public advocacy can decrease. Further analyses suggest one reason for this negative spillover: when deciding whether to adopt personal behaviors, people care most about whether the action feels feasible and easy to take up, whereas for more collective or systemic behaviors, they care more about whether the action will actually be effective. This distinction suggests that interventions should be matched to the level of action they aim to motivate, rather than treating all climate behaviors as psychologically interchangeable.

Collective: Advocacy

At the collective level, I study advocacy: whether people will speak up, donate, contact representatives, and participate in civic action. To identify scalable strategies for motivating advocacy, I led a U.S. megastudy testing seventeen theory-based messages with more than 30,000 participants.

Two patterns stood out. First, emphasizing collective efficacy, the sense that working together can make a difference, consistently increased advocacy, especially when paired with the positive emotions people gain from acting with others. Second, moral appeals grounded in binding values such as purity and sanctity effectively increased engagement, particularly financial advocacy, and did so in ways that reached Republicans without alienating Democrats. Complementary work further shows that advocacy is highest when messages evoke both negative emotions (such as anger, guilt, or fear) and positive emotions (such as hope and pride), suggesting that emotionally complex messages can be especially motivating.

An especially powerful and understudied driver of advocacy in my work is governmental response efficacy: the belief that institutions can and will respond to public pressure. Across studies, this belief strongly predicts advocacy and appears particularly influential for Republicans. Importantly, the same intervention that paired collective efficacy with positive emotion also increased multiple efficacy beliefs at once, suggesting a promising cross-partisan pathway to engagement.

Systemic: Policy Support

At the systemic level, I study support for costly public policies such as congestion pricing. This work examines what makes people willing to accept near-term personal costs in exchange for broader collective benefits.

Here, a recurring finding is that support depends heavily on whether policies and institutions are seen as effective, fair, and responsive. In recent work on congestion pricing in New York and Washington, D.C., the most effective intervention increased outcome efficacy by making the policy’s concrete benefits clear and believable. These findings suggest that support for costly climate policy depends not only on general concern, but on whether people believe the policy will actually work in practice

My research offers a pragmatic optimism: people can be mobilized across partisan lines when collective action feels possible, when institutions are seen as responsive, and when messages connect to shared values and emotions. When people believe their contributions matter and are inspired by both moral clarity and constructive emotion, they are willing to support ambitious climate solutions. That is how we enact the collective behavior and systemic change a livable future requires.

SELECTED PRESENTATIONS

  • 2025 - NYU Climate Initiative Conference (New York, NY)

    Panel discussion and invited talk: Mobilizing Collective Climate Action: A Large-Scale Study of 17 Behavioral Interventions in the U.S.

  • 2025 - Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) Annual Convention (Denver, CO)

    Symposium Talk: Behavioral Interventions for Collective Climate Action.

  • 2024 - Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) Annual Convention (San Diego, CA)

    Symposium Talk: The Differential Impact of Climate Interventions along the Political Divide.

  • 2023 - International Conference on Environmental Psychology (ICEP) (Aarhus, Denmark)

    Symposium Talk: Cultural Individualism/Collectivism Moderates the Effects of Climate Action Interventions.

  • 2023 - NYU Psychology Department Social Speaker Series

    Talk: Political Ideology Differences in Responses to Climate Action Interventions.

Research EXPERIENCE

COLLECTIVE COGNITION )
Member, Stanford Climate Cognition Lab
PI: Dr. Madalina Vlasceanu

2019)
Visiting Researcher, Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab
PI: Dr. Sander van der Linden

COLLECTIVE PRESENT)
Member, NYU Center for Conflict and Cooperation
PI: Dr. Jay Van Bavel

BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE FOR POLICY LAB (2021 - 202
Research Specialist, Princeton Behavioral Science for Policy Lab
PI: Dr. Elke U. Weber

PROGRAM FOR ANXIET)
Research Assistant, UM Program for Anxiety, Stress, & OCD
PI: Dr. Kiara Timpano

COLUMBIA COUPLES LAB (
Research Intern, Columbia Couples Lab
PI: Dr. Niall Bolger