Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The ongoing climate crisis demands massive changes in people's life style. Behavioral economics has highlighted the use of extrinsic incentives (e.g., money) as a powerful tool for changing behavior. However, external incentives come with significant costs, making them feasible primarily for wealthier countries. Here, following recent insights from the field of curiosity and information-seeking, we explore whether internal incentives such as the intrinsic drive for knowing can motivate people to act more pro-environmentally. By developing a novel decision-making task, we showed that the drive for knowing predicts pro-environmental choices. Moreover, participants chose eco-friendly options more when their values were unknown compared to when they were known. Results from this study hold the potential to inform the development of future behavioral interventions, although a replication of its findings is still ongoing.