Artikel
New Paper: Climate choices and attention are shaped more by politics than weather.
Little is known about how extreme weather shapes attention to climate-relevant information when people make choices that have consequences for the climate. Understanding how extreme weather shapes attention and climate action therefore requires a holistic perspective that integrates objective exposure with individual characteristics, including political affiliation and subjective attribution. Our findings suggest that increasing exposure to extreme weather alone is unlikely to accelerate climate action. Instead, at least in the USA, the cause of these events is interpreted through individual lenses, largely shaped by political affiliation. In an increasingly polarized society, these findings highlight the challenge of climate communication when attention to climate-relevant information varies across the political spectrum.
Publication
Hahnel, U. J. J., & Wyss, A. M. (2026). Climate choices and attention are shaped more by politics than weather. Nature Climate Change. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-026-02775-x
New Paper: Initial affect shapes risk-benefit information processing and public support for carbon dioxide removal technologies
Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies are becoming increasingly important, while public support may play a relevant role in their implementation. This support is influenced by how citizens inform themselves about the technology. In our research, we introduced a novel information-sampling task, in which participants could freely choose which information about CDR to attend to, followed by a policy choice experiment assessing public support of CDR technologies. Overall, our findings highlight the reciprocal relationship between affect, endogenous information search, and support for CDR technologies.
Publication
Van Veen, J. F., Azad, Z. R., Wong-Parodi, G. & Hahnel, U. J. J. J. J. (2026). Initial affect shapes risk-benefit information processing and public support for carbon dioxide removal technologies. Environmental Research Letters. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aeb81e
New publication: Exposing the Privacy Paradox as a Chimera
Together with Juliane K. Bücker (University of Magdeburg), Tobias Dienlin (University of Zurich), and Florian G. Kaiser (University of Magdeburg), lab member Ronja Gerdes developed a scale to measure people's commitment to information privacy. In two studies, they showed that the "privacy paradox" (i.e., that people often say that information privacy is important to them, but then not act to actually protect their data) vanishes when the burdens that people are ready to endure in order to protect their information privacy are taken into account. The newly developed scale can reliably account for people's manifest data disclosure behavior.
Publication
Bücker, J. K., Gerdes, R., Dienlin, T., & Kaiser, F. G. (2026). Exposing the Privacy Paradox as a Chimera. European Journal of Psychological Assessment, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1027/1015-5759/a000962
New publication: How climate policy mixes shape electric vehicle adoption from individual decisions to societal change
How do combinations of climate policies influence the transition to electric mobility? In collaboration with Mart van der Kam (Delft University of Technology), Amir Hosein Hadian Rasanan (University of Basel), and Sebastian Gluth (University of Hamburg), Anne and Ulf from our team investigated how a carbon price and climate information work together to influence electric vehicle (EV) adoption.
The study combines behavioural experiments with 1,589 participants from Mexico, South Africa, the United States, and the United Kingdom with agent-based simulations of long-term EV diffusion. This approach links individual decision-making with system-level dynamics to better understand how policy intervention effects unfold over time in social and technological contexts.
Results show that carbon pricing and climate information had additive effects on individual EV choices, even though the two policies competed for attention during decision-making. However, when simulating long-term adoption dynamics using agent-based modelling, the combined effects varied depending on the country and the stage of the transition, ranging from additive to synergistic or sub-additive outcomes.
The study also shows that combining a carbon price with climate information increases public support for climate policy. When the simulations accounted for the fact that public support and policy implementation influence one another, higher public support contributed to more sustained policy implementation and, in turn, higher long-term EV adoption.
The findings highlight that understanding individual behaviour is essential but not sufficient to understand societal change. Effective climate policy requires considering individual behaviour within the dynamic social, technological, and policy context in which it unfolds.
Publication
Günther, A., van der Kam, M., Hadian Rasanan, A. H., Gluth, S., & Hahnel, U. J. J. (2026). Economic and behavioural policy coupling has divergent effects on electric vehicle adoption at individual and system scales. Nature Energy. doi.org/10.1038/s41560-026-02114-6
Message quality and audience characteristics shape evaluation and impact of real-world social media climate communication
People agree which climate advocating messages they like best. Good climate communication can be powerful. This is the bottom line of our new publication.
We empirically analyze climate messages from Twitter: How are these messages received and how impactful are they? We find surprising agreement about message rankings: some messages were consistently evaluated more positively than others by people from different countries and political leaning.
We also find that messages with higher empirical evaluations increase people’s climate change concern and reduce the odds to subsequently engage with climate disinformation.
Publication
Azad, Z. R., Spampatti, T. & Hahnel, U. J. (2026). Message quality and audience characteristics shape evaluation and impact of real-world social media climate communication. Journal Of Environmental Psychology, 113, 103112. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2026.103112