Discovering the psychological building blocks underlying climate action - a longitudinal study of real-world activism

We are in a climate emergency, but governments are reacting too slowly. Grassroots collective action is needed to create political pressure. Those attempts would be much aided by understanding the psychological factors that dispose people to engaging in collective climate action. However, the extant research has several limitations. These include scant causal evidence of which factors trigger action, a lack of focus on the climate crisis itself, a way of measuring action that mostly uses self-report or intentions rather than objectively measured participation, and, finally, the use of mostly cross-sectional studies (rather than longitudinal). Here we undertake a longitudinal study on the effectiveness of an intensive 12-week video intervention designed to increase collective action on the climate crisis using a pre-post within-subjects design. Before and after the intervention, we will measure the psychological predictors identified in previous work, such as collective efficacy. Using a regression model, we strengthen the links between changes in these predictors and changes in both objective and self-reported activist behavior. [Key results and interpretation will go here].