Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Most Americans do not view climate change as an imminent threat. The present paper harnessed the power of two cog-nitive constraints essential to belief formation and revision coherence and causal invariance to guide the developmentof educational materials to foster pro-climate actions. Building on insights from philosophy, cognitive psychology, andanthropology, our materials presented questions on a range of everyday and otherwise personally relatable events to par-ticipants in 10 U.S. states with the highest level of climate skepticism. Participants answered the questions, explainedtheir answers, and received feedback featuring scientific explanations. The latter typically deviate from participants own(invoking the causal-invariance constraint), and are more coherent (invoking the coherence constraint). In support of ourapproach, although our intervention materials did not mention climate change or mitigating actions, they raised willingnessto take pro-climate actions, but did so only when the components hypothesized to enable a coherent pro-climate-actionnarrative were included.