So far, there has been mixed evidence in the literature regarding the relation between environmental attitudes and actual "green" actions, something known as attitude-behavior gap. This raises the question of when attitudes can actually work as a lever to promote environmental objectives, such as climate change mitigation, and, conversely, when other factors would be more effective. We tested the effect of environmental attitudes on behavior in an online experiment with real money at stake and real-world consequences. We found that environmental attitudes affected behavior in low-cost situations while increasing contribution costs generally reduced their effect. This finding is consistent with the low-cost hypothesis of environmental behavior and has important consequences for the design of more effective climate policies in a democratic context.

Effective communication of risks involved in the climate change discussion is crucial and despite ambitious protection policies, the possibility of irreversible consequences actually occurring can only be diminished but never ruled out completely. We present a laboratory experiment that studies how residual risk of failure of climate change policies affects willingness to contribute to such policies. Despite prevailing views on people's risk aversion, we found that contributions were higher at least in the final part of treatments including a residual risk. We interpret this as the product of a psychological process where residual risk puts participants into an "alarm mode," keeping their contributions high. We discuss the broad practical implications this might have on the real-world communication of climate change.

So far, there has been mixed evidence in the literature regarding the relation between environmental attitudes and actual ``green'' actions, something known as attitude-behavior gap. This raises the question of when attitudes can actually work as a lever to promote environmental objectives, such as climate change mitigation, and, conversely, when other factors would be more effective. We tested the effect of environmental attitudes on behavior in an online experiment with real money at stake and real-world consequences. We found that environmental attitudes affected behavior in low-cost situations while increasing contribution costs generally reduced their effect. This finding is consistent with the low-cost hypothesis of environmental behavior and has important consequences for the design of more effective climate policies in a democratic context.

One’s willingness to accept an outcome or even to correct it depends on whether the underlying procedure is deemed legitimate. We examine a modified version of the dictator game, where dictatorship is assigned by a fair procedure that is linked to the participant actions but in effect is completely random, to illustrate that this belief is not independent of the outcome and is self-serving in its nature. We also discuss the perceptions of fairness and merit as potential drivers of the observed behavioral phenomenon.

In order to convince both policy makers and the general public to engage in climate change mitigation activities, it is crucial to communicate the inherent risks in an effective way. Due to the complexity of the system, mitigation activities cannot completely rule out the possibility of the climate reaching a dangerous tipping point but can only reduce it to some unavoidable residual risk level. We present an online experiment based on a sample of US citizens and designed to improve our understanding of how the presence of such residual risk affects the willingness to invest into climate change mitigation. We found that, far from reducing them, the presence of residual risk actually increases investments into mitigation activities. This result suggests that scientists and policy makers should consider being more transparent about communicating the residual risks entailed by such initiatives.