ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Clim.
Sec. Climate and Decision Making
This article is part of the Research TopicClimate-Solidary Pathways: Individual Choices and Collective Strategies for a Just TransitionView all articles
Accuracy-directed Climate Reasoning: How Self-efficacy, Interest, Confidence and Judgments Relate to Knowledge and Reasoning Outcomes
Provisionally accepted
- University of Maryland Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, College Park, United States
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
This study examined how cognitive and motivational factors relate to individuals' reasoning about climate change and sustainability. Specifically, we investigated whether self-efficacy, interest, and confidence in accomplishing environmental sustainability tasks are associated with plausibility judgments, climate change knowledge, and reasoning directionality. A sample of 503 U.S. adults completed measures assessing these constructs. Structural equation modeling showed that interest, self-efficacy, and confidence were positively associated with plausibility judgments, which in turn related to higher levels of climate change knowledge and accuracy-directed reasoning. Participants demonstrating accuracy-directed reasoning exhibited enhanced self-efficacy, greater interest, higher knowledge, and stronger plausibility judgments compared to those engaging in desired outcome-directed reasoning. These findings suggest that self-efficacy, interest, and critical evaluation skills are meaningfully related with epistemic engagement and scientifically grounded reasoning, and may be relevant targets for future efforts at supporting sustainability-oriented action and decision-making.
Keywords: Climate Change, knowledgeconstruction, Motivated reasoning, Motivation, plausibility judgments, sustainability
Received: 15 Sep 2025; Accepted: 26 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Hanedar and Lombardi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Melike Hanedar
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.