🚨 New paper! Think of a place you feel deeply attached to. When you're in that place, do you feel like your life is more meaningful? New work from @ashleykrause.bsky.social suggests you probably do!
Just accepted at Journal of Environmental Psychology, we find places can give our life meaning 🧵
This report, unfortunately, is timed perfectly with the release of my new JPSP article on apocalyptic thinking. Apocalyptic rhetoric is not new, and we are beginning to understand the psychology underlying it. Pre-print available free on my website: www.matthewibillet.com
dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspi...
Apocalyptic beliefs are rooted in our cultural and religious worldviews. Addressing collective threats will require coordination across culturally diverse populations. Understanding how worldviews shape how we interpret and respond to threats builds our capacity for collective action. 5/5
We also asked about risk attitudes towards the 5 most pressing global existential risks informed by the WEF Risk Report. Each narrative component predicted unique variance in risk attitudes, and end of world beliefs predicted unique variance over established predictors of risk perception. 4/5
In a survey of N=1,409 Catholics, Mainline Protestants, Evangelical Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and nonreligious Americans, we find incredible variation in end of world beliefs that is largely accounted for by religiosity and religious affiliation. @pewresearch.org @templetonfdn.bsky.social 3/5
We create a framework for analyzing the psychologically-consequential narrative components of end times beliefs. Previous work assessed the "if" and "when" of the apocalypse; we suggest the "how" and the "what will come after" are also important. We develop and validate a corresponding measure. 2/5
New article in JPSP on Apocalyptic Thinking! Takeaways in the title: End of world beliefs are common, diverse, and predict how people perceive and respond to global risks.
Cindel J.M. White, @azimshariff.bsky.social & Ara Norenzayan. @ucirvine.bsky.social @psych.ubc.ca @spspnews.bsky.social 1/5
What motivates people to engage in climate advocacy?
In a new PNAS Nexus megastudy [https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf400] led by @dgoldwert.bsky.social we tested 17 theoretical interventions on a large US sample (N=31,324) to increase public, political, and financial climate advocacy.
1/5
Revision posted! An evolutionary model of identity signaling with nested/overlapping/intersectional identities, complex multidimensional signaling capabilities, and a primer on ancient Mesopotamia. What more could you ask for?
osf.io/preprints/so...
Work done in collaboration with Friedrich Götz (@ubcpsych.bsky.social), Andrés Gvirtz (@kingscollegelondon.bsky.social), @stephaniekramer.bsky.social (@pewresearch.org) , and Ara Norenzayan (UBC)
New pre-print analyzing 25,000 Christian sermon transcripts across the USA. Churches account for most systematic variance in sermon content, geographic region accounts for none. We identify niches in sermon content that may guide religious competition in USA.
osf.io/preprints/ps...
We outline some work done by our team and by others on the topic. We cover things like, why ecospirituality might be so prevalent around the world; how it might shape sustainable behavior through activating moral cognitions; and how being particularly connected with nature might benefit well-being.
Interested in the psychology of people's spiritual connections with nature, and how it shapes well-being and sustainable behavior?
Check out my open-access Current Directions article with Adam Baimel (@abaimel.bsky.social), Mark Schaller, and Ara Norenzayan: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
Below is my new post about our Three Stages of Religious Decline paper (www.nature.com/articles/s41...).
We argue that a similar process of decline affects countries on every populated continent, including countries in which Christianity, Islam, Buddhism or Hinduism is the largest religion.
A🧵
An incredible resource on Social Psychology today spanning 50 beefy chapters written by some of the greatest scholars today. The best part is, the new Handbook of Social Psychology is completely free and available online to download. Here's the link.
openpublishing.princeton.edu/projects/the...
Kombucha girl maybe meme. On the left, frowny face: working on an important manuscript On the right, intrigued: spending two hours to create a figure that came to my mind quite randomly
Fully-funded PhD position on the cultural evolution of environmental management!
Link evolution, ecology and behavioral science in the ACE Lab timwaring.info Details: forms.gle/gZWK9BpwYfoG...
@culturalevolsoc.bsky.social @alexmesoudi.com @hyperadapthyrax.bsky.social @michael.muthukrishna.com
After a long wait, the working paper for the Many-Economists Project: The Sources of Researcher Variation in Economics. We had 146 teams perform the same research three times, each time with less freedom. What source of freedom leads to different choices and results? papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
How can we sustain both our planet and ourselves? Drawing on a new review of research by @matthewibillet.bsky.social, @abaimel.bsky.social, and colleagues - as well as faith and climate scientist leaders like @katharinehayhoe.com, my article for @psychologytoday.com explores what we can do.
Where do moralizing religions come from? Useless cognitive by-products?Cultural group selection for complex societies?
Our Psych Review paper argues: neither. Let’s rethink their cognitive & evolutionary origins🧵
w/ @manvir.bsky.social @nbaumard @jbaptistandre.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1037/rev0...
Does poverty lead to risk taking or risk avoidance? Turns out, to both. Our new paper (with D. Nettle & W. Frankenhuis) in @royalsocietypublishing.org explains why, and conducts preregistered tests of our ‘desperation threshold’ model.
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
A 🧵
Critical comms about climate change is increasingly happening on social media. But it is challenging to study climate comms on popular social media platforms, so researchers often rely on survey research. How much do survey responses tell us how things will play out on social media? Thread 🧵
Does anyone have recommendations for more recent textbooks on environmental psych / conservation psych? I love this one by Gardner and Stern, but it's quite outdated now. #APA34 #environmentalpsych #conservationpsych #sustainability
Check out our new article on ecospirituality!
Takeaways: Ecospirituality is associated with environmental concern and well-being, and changes in ecospirituality are associated with changes in these variables too! (plus a large pre-registered outdoor experiment that kinda failed!)
Super interesting - another great article from Gordon Hodson
how this ideational response to external threats (compared to others, like seeing the threat as part of an apocalyptic prophecy) mediates the kinds of responses a cultural group will have to those threats. 2/2
Very interesting results in this new meta-analysis of why people turn to conspiratorial thinking. Conspiratorial thinking is a response to external threats, not really a trait of specific kinds of people. I want to know... 1/2
...We haven't treated childhood experiences as a separate psychological construct - maybe it could help build empathy and good faith across the political divide, especially given that liberals and conservatives both care about leaving a better world for future generations. 13/13
One interesting finding of this analysis is that childhood experiences in nature come out as an empirically distinct factor from other positive experiences in nature (instrumental benefits factor)... 12/n
...I suspect other processes are directly polarizing environmental attitudes. Other research suggests partisan news media is likely a major factor here. Pure speculation - I think partisan news media less so affects environmental motives than specific attitudes about climate change and policy. 11/n