“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 explores the social and psychological foundations of climate engagement, investigating how beliefs, values, social norms, and communication strategies interact to shape climate attitudes, advocacy, and policy support.
Through large-scale experimental studies and interdisciplinary collaborations, I seek to find ways to bring people together, regardless of their politics or culture, to tackle climate change. My early research offered evidence that subtle wording tweaks don’t do much to boost engagement. But later studies showed the power of value-aligned messaging—appeals to collective efficacy, moral principles, and common goals—to activate support across the ideological spectrum. By exploring how these factors scale from individuals to communities and societies, I aim to inform more inclusive, effective, and evidence-based approaches to climate communication and policy. Ultimately, I hope to develop empirically grounded tools that help close the gap between what people believe and what they actually do, inspiring widespread, lasting action for sustainable climate solutions worldwide.
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 Social Identity and Morality Lab at NYU and Dr. Madalina Vlasceanu's Climate Cognition Lab at Stanford.
Learn more about my experience on my CV.
My research aims to identify effective strategies for motivating meaningful, large-scale action on climate change.
Language and Climate Action
Many have argued that we just need the right words—like calling it a “crisis” rather than “change”—to mobilize people for climate action. Yet when we tested this assumption in a large global sample, we found that subtly adjusting terms doesn’t meaningfully shift willingness to take action. In other words, it’s not about clever catchphrases, but the deeper motivations and values that drive us. This realization urged me to move beyond superficial tweaks to language, toward more substantive psychological messages and behavior change strategies to alter climate change beliefs and mobilize climate action.
When beliefs don’t match behavior
In subsequent work, we tested expert-crowdsourced, theoretically derived behavioral interventions aimed at stimulating pro-climate beliefs and behaviors. Climate debates often feel stuck along partisan lines, with liberals embracing and conservatives rejecting climate messages. Yet this work shows a more complicated picture. Across a large global sample, while liberals reported stronger beliefs in climate change and greater support for climate policies, both liberals and conservatives put in similar amounts of effort in a tree-planting donation task.
This suggests that the political resistance to accepting climate change or supporting climate policies might not necessarily translate into a behavioral resistance to engaging in climate action—if we can tap the right motivations. At the same time, our tests of various interventions showed that what worked to bolster beliefs or policy support paradoxically reduced actions for conservatives. This finding points to an urgent need for more thoughtful, value-aligned approaches that resonate across ideological divides.
Finding What Works for Whom
With these insights in mind, I led a megastudy to test 16 promising expert-crowdsourced interventions that might motivate collective climate advocacy. Here, we looked beyond just telling people “it’s important” and toward stories and frames that help people feel capable, connected, and morally engaged. Our results showed that emphasizing collective efficacy and the emotional benefits of collective action proved particularly effective overall. For more conservative-leaning audiences, appeals grounded in moral foundations of purity and sanctity yielded meaningful increases in financial support. Instead of trying to fit everyone into a one-size-fits-all message, aligning interventions with people’s existing values can open new pathways to engagement.
Making Climate Action Stick
In ongoing and future work, I plan to field-test the most promising interventions from the megastudy in real-world contexts, collaborating with organizations and community groups to target climate action among high-impact actors — because what matters most is not what people say in a survey, but what they actually do. Simultaneously, I’m investigating how emotions like hope, anger, and fear work to galvanize different audiences. And I’m using new tools like natural language processing to understand how the words of political leaders ripple out to shape public discourse and, ultimately, public action.
By understanding our social norms, political identities, and emotional levers, I hope to help carve out more inclusive, effective paths toward meaningful climate solutions.
SELECTED RESEARCH PRESENTATIONS
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2025 - Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) Annual Convention (Denver, CO)
Symposium Talk: Goldwert, D., Constantino, S. M., ... & Vlasceanu, M. Behavioral Interventions for Collective Climate Action.
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2024 - Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) Annual Convention (San Diego, CA)
Symposium Talk: Goldwert, D., Berkebile-Weinberg, M., Doell, K., Van Bavel, J. J., & Vlasceanu, M. The Differential Impact of Climate Interventions along the Political Divide.
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2023 - International Conference on Environmental Psychology (ICEP) (Aarhus, Denmark)
Symposium Talk: Goldwert, D., Doell, K., Van Bavel, J. J., Grayson, S., & Vlasceanu, M. Cultural Individualism/Collectivism Moderates the Effects of Climate Action Interventions.
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2023 - NYU Psychology Department Social Speaker Series
Talk: Goldwert, D., Berkebile-Weinberg, M., Doell, K., Van Bavel, J. J., & Vlasceanu, M. Political Ideology Differences in Responses to Climate Action Interventions.
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2023 - Association for Psychological Science (APS) Annual Convention (Washington D.C.)
Poster Presentation: Goldwert, D., Doell, K., Van Bavel, J. J., Grayson, S., & Vlasceanu, M. The Impact of Cultural Values on the Effectiveness of Climate Change Interventions.
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2023 - Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) Annual Convention (Atlanta, GA)
Poster Presentation: Goldwert, D., Doell, K., Van Bavel, J., Grayson, S., & Vlasceanu, M. How should you be referring to the climate crisis for higher impact?
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2022 - Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) Annual Convention (San Francisco, CA)
Poster Presentation: Goldwert, D., Broos, H., Dev, A., Broad, & Timpano, K. R. Understanding the role of individual difference factors in shaping information processing and emotional responses to climate change messaging
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2021 - University of Miami 13th Annual Research, Creativity, and Innovation Forum (Coral Gables, FL)
Poster Presentation: Goldwert, D., Broos, H., Dev, A., Broad, & Timpano, K. R. The Impact of Intolerance of Uncertainty and Climate Change Anxiety on Climate Change Engagement and Distress.
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2021 - Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) Annual Convention
Poster Presentation: Goldwert, D., Broad, K., Clement, A. C., & Timpano, K. R. Climate change concerns following a hurricane correspond to worry due to the storm but not general worry or tangible hardships.
Research EXPERIENCE
COLLECTIVE COGNITION )
Member, Stanford Climate Cognition Lab
PI: Dr. Madalina Vlasceanu
2019)
Visiting Research Student, Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab
PI: Dr. Sander van der Linden
COLLECTIVE PRESENT)
Member, NYU Social Identity & Morality Lab
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
