ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Environmental Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1433280
Overcoming heuristics that hinder people's acceptance of climatechange-mitigation technologies
Provisionally accepted
- 1Institute of Psychology, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, Madgeburg, Germany
- 2Faculty of Humanities, Social Science and Education, Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, Madgeburg, Germany
- 3Fraunhofer Institute for Factory Operation and Automation (IFF), Magdeburg, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany
- 4Independent researcher, Berlin, Germany
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The overall research objective of the present study is the investigation of the effects of a strongly expressed restriction-oriented climate change mitigation heuristic (SER heuristic) on people's attitude toward and acceptance of climate change mitigation technologies such as Carbon Capture and Utilization (CCU). Furthermore, we want to examine the effects of a scenario-based communication intervention approach on the promotion of a supportive attitude toward and acceptance of CCU, especially referring to people characterized by a SER heuristic. Against this background, we present empirical findings based on an online experiment including a scenario-based intervention in an initial sample of 401 German participants. In line with our expectations, our findings show that participants characterized by a SER heuristic report a significantly lower supportive attitude toward CCU as well as a lower acceptance of CCU, compared to participants who are not characterized by a SER heuristic. Furthermore, our findings imply the examined scenario-based communication intervention approach to be an effective tool for the promotion of participants' supportive attitude toward CCU and acceptance of CCU. Taken together, the present study provides further valuable insights for the promotion of people's supportive attitude toward as well as of their acceptance of necessary new climate change mitigation technologies such as CCU.
Keywords: Climate protection, Climate change mitigation technologies, Intervention evaluation, restriction heuristic, vignette methodology
Received: 15 May 2024; Accepted: 21 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Blöbaum, Schmidt, Boecher, Arlinghaus, Krause and Matthies. 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: Anke Blöbaum, Institute of Psychology, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, Madgeburg, 39106, Germany
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