People often encounter large bodies of information with environmental significance (e.g., data on emissions from flights). To evaluate the environmental footprint of such data, it must be integrated, a process that can be biased depending on stimulus characteristics. In two experiments, the present study showed that carbon dioxide emissions are perceived as more environmentally harmful when drawn from a negatively skewed stimulus distribution and more environmentally friendly when drawn from a positively skewed distribution, even when the sum of the emissions is identical across the two distributions. This distribution-density effect was particularly strong when participants had context foreknowledge about the stimulus distribution’s range and shape. A third experiment found that real-world familiarity with a stimulus distribution does not provide the same effect as this type of context foreknowledge. Stimulus structures influence how people evaluate environmental impact, and more knowledge can sometimes increase rather than decrease susceptibility to cognitive bias.

This study aims to expand the understanding of public acceptance of carbon taxes by exploring the role of habits. Habits play a pivotal role in guiding our behaviors and reasoning and can even influence our self perception and identity but remain an underexplored variable in relation to public policy acceptance. We employed a large scale (N > 5200) national survey to measure public acceptance of higher carbon taxation in Sweden, also capturing car driving habits, car usage, and other relevant variables. The findings show that habit strength is negatively correlated with policy acceptance, regardless of self reported driving distance, while also appearing to moderate the relationship between policy acceptance and environmental concern and political leaning, variables previously shown to be of relevance. The study suggests that the influence of habits needs to be recognized to better understand the formation of climate policy acceptance, and exploring this perspective paves the way for future research.

Lifelong learning can be indispensable for the adaptation to continuously evolving labor markets and societal demands. In the current study, we examined psychological factors, notably aspects of personality (personality traits in the five-factor model and trait curiosity), self-reflection and motivation in relation to attitudes to lifelong learning. A specific aim was to examine the relative importance of these factors in their contribution to attitudes to lifelong learning. The study was carried out by use of a digital survey and included 717 adults (Mage= 47.93) within working life. The results showed that self-reflection and trait curiosity were the strongest predictors of attitudes to lifelong learning but work intrinsic motivation and openness to experience (a personality trait in the five-factor model) also contributed with unique explanatory power, although to a lesser degree. The results can inform individualized accessibility strategies for lifelong learning. 

Using Sweden as a study case, this article explores the polarized opinions to wind and nuclear energy, two low carbon energy options that have been shown to be politically controversial. In a wide-scale survey (N = 5200), general attitudes to wind and nuclear energy are captured, as well as to projects in the proximity of people's homes. The study demonstrates a deep polarization of energy preferences in Sweden, finding strong associations between worldviews, political orientation, environmental concern, and support for or resistance to wind and nuclear energy. The study concludes that support for both energy options is reduced when wind or nuclear power is constructed near people's home, but also suggests that the proximity effect is particularly strong for individuals with strong TAN (traditional, authoritarian, nationalistic) values and right leaning political ideology. The article argues that politically motivated reasoning might explain the polarization of attitudes, yet this effect seems to become less relevant when people are asked to judge potential energy infrastructure located close them.

When people estimate the summative carbon footprint of a sequence of events, how are the individual events integrated? In three experiments, we found that summative carbon footprint judgments of item sequences are disproportionately influenced by items at the end of the sequence in comparison with those at the beginning—a recency effect. When, for example, sequences ended with a low carbon footprint item, they were assigned a lower carbon footprint than corresponding sequences with an identical content but different item order. The results also revealed that a green peak (presenting many low carbon footprint items at once) had a relatively large effect on estimates when the peak was contextually distinct from other items in terms of its valence. The results are consistent with an account within which distinctiveness of representations within short-term memory differentially influences decision-making and suggest that memory processes bias the perceived environmental footprint of temporally separated instances.

The process-oriented account of auditory distraction suggests that task-disruption is a consequence of the joint action of task- and sound-related processes. Here, four experiments put this view to the test by examining the extent to which to-be-ignored melodies (with or without lyrics) influence vocal-motor processing. Using song retrieval tasks (i.e., reproduction of melodies or lyrics from long-term memory), the results revealed a pattern of disruption that was consistent with an interference-by-process view: disruption depended jointly on the nature of the vocal-motor retrieval (e.g., melody retrieval via humming vs. spoken lyrics) and the characteristics of the sound (whether it contained lyrics and was familiar to the participants). Furthermore, the sound properties, influential in disrupting song reproduction, were not influential for disrupting visual-verbal short-term memory—a task that is arguably underpinned by non-semantic vocal-motor planning processes. Generally, these results cohere better with the process-oriented view, in comparison with competing accounts (e.g., interference-by-content).

When asked to estimate the carbon footprint of a bundle of low carbon footprint and high carbon footprint items, people typically report a lower value compared to estimating the high carbon footprint items alone. This finding is called the negative footprint illusion. Previous research suggests that people might be made less susceptible to this effect depending on whether they are asked to evaluate how environmentally friendly or how environmentally damaging the items are. In the current study, we used large instead of small stimulus sets (i.e. a more powerful experimental manipulation than that in previous research) and show under these circumstances it does not matter whether participants are required to make friendliness or damaging estimates. The role of attribute substitution along with other conceptual and methodological issues to the negative footprint illusion are discussed, particularly in relation to a recent paper by Gorissen et al. [2024. Green versus grey framing: Exploring the mechanism behind the negative footprint illusion in environmental sustainability assessments. Sustainability, 16(4), 1411]. 

What causes interference in short-term memory? We report the novel finding that immediate memory for visually-presented verbal items is sensitive to disruption from task-irrelevant vibrotactile stimuli. Specifically, short-term memory for a visual sequence is disrupted by a concurrently presented sequence of vibrations, but only when the vibrotactile sequence entails change (when the sequence “jumps” between the two hands). The impact on visual-verbal serial recall was similar in magnitude to that for auditory stimuli (Experiment 1). Performance of the missing item task, requiring recall of item-identity rather than item-order, was unaffected by changing-state vibrotactile stimuli (Experiment 2), as with changing-state auditory stimuli. Moreover, the predictability of the changing-state sequence did not modulate the magnitude of the effect, arguing against an attention-capture conceptualisation (Experiment 3). Results support the view that interference in short-term memory is produced by conflict between incompatible, amodal serial-ordering processes (interference-by-process) rather than interference between similar representational codes (interference-by-content).

This paper explores wind power attitudes in Sweden, considering the proximity of wind power installations, using a large-scale survey (N = 5280). The study examines if attitudes were affected by policies that provide collective financial benefits through municipal tax revenues, personal benefits through direct compensation, or openings for democratic involvement. Only 15 % of the respondents expressed negative attitudes to wind power as a measure to speed up the transition to a fossil free society, while 26 % were negative to wind power built within 5 km from their homes. Attitudes were mainly predicted by ideological standpoints, environmental concern and political and governmental trust. The study found that for wind power constructed in the home municipality, respondents preferred collectively distributed financial benefits, while direct personal compensation offers the best prospects to influence ideologically motivated attitudes. None of the policy interventions tested in this study had any significant effect on respondents with strongly negative views.

Can memory of eco-labeling bias how consumption is perceived and influence subsequent consumer decisions? We report three experiments showing that the perceived environmental friendliness of simulated shopping sequences is disproportionately influenced by what happens at the end of the sequence. For example, sequences that ended with a high carbon footprint item were perceived as less environmentally friendly than other sequences with the same content but with items in different order—a recency effect (Experiments 1–3). Judgments depended more on how often environmentally significant items were purchased than on the quantity of those items (Experiment 2). Furthermore, after completing a shopping sequence that was perceived as relatively harmful to the environment, participants were more prone to select a comparably expensive eco-labeled item over a cheaper but less environmentally friendly item in subsequent purchase decisions—a spillover effect (Experiment 3). The results stress the role of memory in environmentally significant consumer behavior.