How can psychology help us understand and solve environmental and energy-related problems?
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Public perceptions and acceptability of sustainable transitions depend on who is developing them, how they’re developing and when the public is involved
Professor Goda Perlaviciute shares her research insights on public acceptability of sustainable projects, and how public trust depends on who is the developer is, how it is being developed, and how (and how soon) the general public is involved in the decision-making process.
Circular citizenship behaviours to promote systemic change: Influences of values, beliefs, norms, and personal agency
Our findings highlight much untapped potential for systemic change through citizen action and offer insights into how engagement in Circular Citizenship Behaviours (CCBs) might be promoted.
An opinion dynamics approach to model and analyze the behavior of consumers in an energy network
Motivated by theories and evidence from the social psychology literature, we propose a novel continuous-time mathematical model that captures the evolution of motivation and behavior of energy consumers in a social network.
A deep dive below the human surface: The effect of basic human values on coastal residents’ and tourists’ marine personal norm, mediated by marine value orientations
This research enhances theoretical understanding of how basic human values and value orientations relate to each other and to feelings of responsibility to protect marine environments. In addition, it provides practical insights for engaging the public in marine conservation efforts.
Restoring landscapes to build common futures: Land redistribution and environmental action in rural Scotland
By centering local agency, affective ties to place, and democratic governance, restorative commoning offers a pathway for more inclusive and sustainable approaches to landscape revitalisation.
Values rise to the top in Dutch National Climate Citizens Assembly
Values like the importance of listening to citizens, and to each other, engaging everyone, and ensuring that polluters pay emerged over the months of meetings by the 175 participants in the Dutch National Climate Citizens' Assembly.
“The people at home want solutions”: most voters support strong climate policy
Political party leaders often claim their plans and policies represent what “the people" want, or at least reflect the opinion of the majority of their voters. Yet our colleagues professor Goda Perlaviciute, associate professor Thijs Bouman, and post doc Žan Mlakar say there is one topic that most voters support that politicians rarely campaign on: stronger climate policy.
Forest or machine? Public perceptions and acceptability of negative emissions technologies and practices across six European countries
We conducted a large scale survey on NETPs in six EU countries (N = 5,310) to examine: (1) public preferences for NETPs, next to other mitigation options; (2) how people evaluate the environmental and intergenerational consequences and acceptability of nature-based (i.e., afforestation and reforestation; AR) and technology-based NETPs (i.e., direct air capture with carbon storage; DACCS); (3) the relationship between the evaluation of consequences and acceptability judgements of AR and DACCS; and (4) public preferences for AR and DACCS in general versus in their own country.
Who we are and what we do
The Environmental Psychology Groningen expertise group investigates how willing people are to make a personal contribution to the cause of combating climate change and which policies can effectively encourage sustainable behaviour.