Behavioural Public Policy (2021), 5: 4, 439–453

© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/bpp.2020.38

Making behavioral science integral to

climate science and action
BARUCH FISCHHOFF*
Department of Engineering and Public Policy, Institute for Politics and Strategy, Carnegie Mellon University,
Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Abstract: The behavioral sciences were there at the beginning of the

systematic study of climate change. However, in the ensuing quarter century,
they largely faded from view, during which time public discourse and policy
evolved without them. That disengagement and the recent reengagement
suggest lessons for the future role of the behavioral sciences in climate
science and policy. Looking forward, the greatest promise lies in projects that
make behavioral science integral to climate science by: (1) translating
behavioral results into the quantitative estimates that climate analyses need;
(2) making climate research more relevant to climate-related decisions; and
(3) treating the analytical process as a behavioral enterprise, potentially
subject to imperfection and improvement. Such collaborations could afford
the behavioral sciences more central roles in setting climate-related policies,
as well as implementing them. They require, and may motivate, changes in
academic priorities.

Submitted 3 July 2020; accepted 3 July 2020

A historic opportunity

In 1979, the then-new US Department of Energy (DOE) commissioned the

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to help
develop a 20-year plan for its Carbon Dioxide Effects Research and
Assessment Program. That effort produced a research agenda (US
Department of Energy, 1980a) and a supporting workshop summary (US
Department of Energy, 1980b). Even then, it was clear that “The probable
outcome is beyond human experience” (US Department of Energy, 1980a,
p. Intro-1). At the time, international research was coordinated by the

* Correspondence to: Department of Engineering and Public Policy, Institute for Politics and Strategy,
Carnegie Mellon University, Porter Hall 223E, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA.
E-mail: [email protected]

439
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 440 BARUCH FISCHHOFF

Global Atmospheric Research Program. Coincidentally, the display window of

a bookstore near to the workshop hotel featured The World According to Garp
(Irving, 1978). One might have imagined that our message was already a
bestseller.
The project had five working groups. Four dealt with effects: on the oceans
and the cryosphere; on the managed biosphere; on the less managed biosphere;
and on economics and geopolitics. The fifth group, which I joined, considered
social and institutional responses to the threat. Figure 1 has an excerpt from
our report. Except for the first sentence, it could be written today. The path
forward seemed so clear that, soon afterward, I wrote what might be the
first article proposing a behavioral research agenda (Fischhoff, 1981). I
asked Lita Furby, a developmental psychologist with cross-cultural expertise,
to help write the workshop paper on ‘psychological dimensions of climate
change’ (Fischhoff & Furby, 1983). Box 1 presents the five projects that we
proposed. These, too, seem relevant today.
The path looked bright for research that would be good for science, as well
as for society. The projects in Figure 1 and Box 1 all require collaboration
among sciences, which could learn from one another, and with publics, who
could pose fresh problems and perspectives. However, that was not to be,
for reasons that can inform future research.

A missed opportunity
The grand plans of the DOE–AAAS initiative ended with the 1980 Presidential
election. In the ensuing period, the physical sciences generally managed to
protect enough of their climate-related programs to keep going and gradually
increase over time. The behavioral sciences, having no programs to begin with,
stayed on the sidelines – for the next quarter century. The few projects during
that period suggest the contributions that the behavioral sciences might have
made, and might make in the future, toward characterizing the human
impacts of climate change and engaging the public in mitigation and
adaptation.
The preceding period had seen active behavioral research on energy conser-
vation, prompted by 1970s oil crises. However, that research was being wound
down, without having created a sustained institutional presence that might
pivot to climate change (Stern & Elliot, 1984). The National Academy of
Sciences created a Committee on Human Dimensions of Global Change
(HDGC), hoping that someone would fund the research opportunities that it
identified (National Research Council, 1992). Willett Kempton and his collea-
gues showed how a multi-method approach could capture the richness of
diverse groups’ climate-related decisions (e.g., Kempton, 1991). Ann

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 Making behavioral science integral to climate science and action 441

Figure 1. Decision-making about climate change: a 1980 call for research and
action. Source: US Department of Energy (1980b, pp. vii–viii).

Bostrom and her colleagues studied the mental models that shape the credibil-
ity of claims about climate change (e.g., Bostrom et al., 1994). Jon Krosnick
and his colleagues pieced together the closest thing we had to a tracking
survey of climate beliefs and attitudes (e.g., Krosnick et al., 2000).
As we did little, greenhouse gases continued to accumulate in the atmos-
phere, where they will take generations to dissipate. Vested interests,
opposed to specific climate-related policies (e.g., reduced fossil fuel use,
better control of methane emissions), honed their arguments for attacking
climate science in general (Oreskes & Conway, 2010). Long-term capital
investments (e.g., buildings, transportation infrastructure) were made, con-
straining future action. Development proceeded as though ecosystems would
be as resilient in the future as they had been in the past. Domestic, foreign

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 442 BARUCH FISCHHOFF

Box 1. Psychological dimensions of climate change: five research projects.

Project 1. Identifying and characterizing subjective aspects of the ‘facts’ of
CO2-induced climatic change
(1) Where do subjective judgments enter into scientific analyses?
(2) How valid are those judgments?
(3) How well are experts able to identify and assess such judgments?
(4) How can we make better use of experts by better understanding the
limits to their abilities?
Project 2. Understanding and improving lay decision-makers’ perceptions
of the facts of CO2-induced climatic change
(1) How do lay decision-makers interpret the facts presented to them by
experts?
(2) Is this testimony about climate consistent with their direct sensory
experience with weather; if not, how are conflicts resolved?
(3) What kinds of information pose particular conceptual problems?
(4) How can such problems be remedied so that decision-makers can make
the best use of available scientific knowledge and the wisdom of their
own experience?
Project 3. Clarifying and enriching the space of possible action options
(1) What options naturally occur to people?
(2) How is feasibility judged?
(3) What consequences (or side effects) tend to be overlooked?
(4) In what ways are decision-makers prisoners of their own experience?
Project 4. Understanding how alternative responses to climatic change are
evaluated
(1) How do people combine multiple and conflicting risks and benefits of
various options into a single decision?
(2) How can people’s opinions on these issues be accurately elicited so as to
inform government officials?
(3) How can faulty elicitation methods distort the values expressed through
them?
Project 5. Anticipating and clarifying conflicts created by the inequitable
effects of CO2-induced climate change; offering paths of resolution
(1) How will climate change pit nation against nation, group against
group?
(2) What commons dilemmas will be created (or exist already)?

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 Making behavioral science integral to climate science and action 443

(3) What sorts of mistrust and misunderstanding will emerge and can be
avoided?
(4) Can frameworks or options be devised for conflict resolution?
Source: Fischhoff and Furby (1983).

and national security policies ignored the potentially destabilizing effects of

climate change.
In retrospect, the climate science community appears to have played a strong
hand poorly, even considering the power of the opposition. By some accounts,
over that period, the chance to halt catastrophic climate change was lost (Rich,
2019; Wallace-Wells, 2019). Perhaps things would have been different with a
sustained investment in behavioral science research to help characterize human
impacts, assess the realism of possible policies, establish two-way communica-
tions with the public and guide climate science in relevant directions.
The next section discusses the climate science community’s role in missing
these opportunities as it framed the issues and controlled research resources.
The following section discusses our own role, asking how the behavioral
sciences might have been part of the problem. The section after that considers
what has – and has not – changed in the recent welcome surge in behavioral
science related to climate change and where future opportunities lie. It leads
to a discussion of the institutional arrangements needed to realize them. The
conclusion asks how different our climate present might have been had the
behavioral sciences been fuller partners and what lessons the experience
holds for its role in other arenas (e.g., geoengineering, machine learning).
Throughout, ‘behavioral science’ refers to the study of individuals situated in
the groups, organizations, cultures and political entities that shape and are
shaped by them. ‘Climate science’ refers to the physical sciences that dominate
the field (e.g., atmospheric chemistry and modeling). The biological sciences’
experience has been somewhat like our own.1

Absorbing behavioral science in climate science

Behavioral science’s reception in climate science followed the natural pattern
when one discipline owns a problem by virtue of getting there first. That

1 An anonymous review commented, “Back in the early days of social science engagement with
climate science, I sometimes quipped: ‘It took climatologists more than a decade to discover that
there was life on the planet they were modeling; they still haven’t acknowledged the presence of
intelligent life.’”

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 444 BARUCH FISCHHOFF

discipline sets priorities and directs resources to studying them. In this case,
that discipline was the physical science that first postulated greenhouse gas pro-
cesses and then painstakingly described their extent, drivers and complications.
It pursued the curiosity-driven problem-solving that guides any normal science,
with little perceived need or capacity for input from other sciences. It also
assumed that the facts would speak for themselves, once they were known
with sufficient confidence to be shared.
The specific expression of this general pattern reflected the distinctive fea-
tures of the lead discipline. Physical scientists excel at analyzing complex,
bounded, quantitatively defined problems. The complexity of those analyses
means that endless refinements are possible, each needing attention before
other disciplines are engaged. With climate, the bounds of the analyses
included no behavioral variables, except in highly aggregate form (e.g.,
energy consumption). Their quantitative formulation excluded behavioral
research, unless it could be translated into analysis-friendly terms.
As an added barrier, many physical scientists doubted that behavior could be
studied scientifically or that the behavioral sciences are sciences at all. Even
sympathetic physical scientists lacked the expertise to identify, recruit and
absorb behavioral scientists with complementary knowledge and skills.
When funding was available for behavioral science, review panels dominated
by physical scientists might find nothing that they liked, because none of the
proposed research looked like science to them, with the familiar features of
complex, bounded, quantitatively defined problems. When money got tight,
behavioral scientists often found themselves last in, first out.
When some climate scientists began to sound the alarm, behavioral scientists
might have been useful allies in communicating with the public. Here, too,
natural processes left them out. On the one hand, physical scientists wanted
to be sure about any specific research results before saying anything. On the
other hand, the general reality of climate change seemed so clear that
the public would immediately grasp its portent. Scientists who spoke to the
public risked professional censure, as seen in some scientists’ distaste for
Carl Sagan’s success. Climate scientists also risked misreading their audience,
falling prey to the human tendency to exaggerate how well one understands
and is understood by others (Nickerson, 1999). The very intellectual skills
that make climate scientists so good at their analyses also make them very dif-
ferent from the general public. As a result, they may have particular difficulty
intuiting others’ perceptions.
In retrospect, communications from that era overcomplicated the problem
and oversimplified the solution. The essence of the problem is captured in
“The probable outcome is beyond human experience.” Grasping the fateful
gamble being taken with our collective future did not require deep

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 Making behavioral science integral to climate science and action 445

understanding of any single science’s piece of the complex underlying pro-

cesses. However, directing that concern toward specific possible solutions
did require detailed analysis of their costs and benefits. The absence of those
analyses exposed climate activists to the claim that “one of the real tragedies
that totally distorted the debate over climate change was that it got tied into
the solution in a way that if you accepted the first you had to accept the
second” (Gingrich, 2017). Whether that framing justified attacking climate
science in general, in order to undermine specific unwanted solutions, is a sep-
arate question.

Adapting behavioral science to climate science

These barriers to entry notwithstanding, it is only fair to ask how well we
exploited what opportunities there were. After all, behavioral scientists were
invited to the DOE–AAAS initiative, thanks to far-sighted organizers such as
Elise Boulding, Lester Lave, Roger Revelle and Steve Schneider. Did natural
tendencies of our own disciplines keep us from doing more? Given that phys-
ical sciences were, deservedly, the lead disciplines, could we have done more to
connect our research with theirs?
In principle, there were (and are) three possible ways to connect. One is
translating our results into the quantitative estimates that their analyses
need. The second is helping to make their research more relevant to climate-
related decisions. The third is treating the analytical process as a behavioral
enterprise, potentially subject to imperfection and improvement. At that
time, the worlds of climate scientists and behavioral scientists were too far
apart to make those connections without greater effort than we (or they)
could (or would) make.
The first kind of connection – translating behavioral results into analytical
terms – might have been good for our science, as well as theirs. It would
have situated our general theories in specific settings; created clear, shared
definitions of variables; promoted practical as well as statistical significance;
and produced assessments of uncertainty in terms suited to sensitivity analyses.
However, climate analyses had no places for behavioral science knowledge,
and we failed to create them. Had we tried, we might have found climate scien-
tists to be reluctant partners. However, running that experiment would have
required deeper engagement with climate science and scientists than we
could muster. It might also have met resistance from within our disciplines,
given the time that it would have diverted from conventional research activities.
Behavioral scientists had more success with the second kind of connection:
making climate science more relevant to climate decisions (e.g., Kempton,
1991; Bostrom et al., 1994). The resulting research was, arguably, productive

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 446 BARUCH FISCHHOFF

scientifically. It revealed how seemingly similar terms can evoke divergent asso-
ciations (e.g., climate change, global warming, risk), how mental models of
physical processes can affect the credibility of scientific claims (e.g., how
global warming might produce severe winter storms) and how people can con-
struct preferences for the novel tradeoffs posed by climate-related policies.
Progress was easier here because we could do the research on our own and
because some climate scientists liked having their story told, even if they did
not think that they needed help telling it. We made little progress, though, in
helping climate scientists to make their analyses more relevant to specific
climate-related decisions, defined precisely enough that institutions and indivi-
duals could deliberate them.
We had similarly little success in creating the collaborations needed to make
the third potential connection: treating climate science as a behavioral
endeavor. All sciences have two subjective elements: professional judgments,
which take over when the data run out or need interpretation; and value judg-
ments, which determine which issues are studied, how terms are defined, and
how cautiously results are interpreted (Fischhoff & Kadvany, 2011;
Fischhoff, 2015). Behavioral science can address both forms of subjectivity
in ways that could help climate science to direct and defend its work.
However, scientists never like being told that their work is fallible, incompre-
hensible and incomplete. In order to make our case, intellectually and interper-
sonally, we would have had to become much more integral to the climate
science community. Both we and they bear responsibility for that failure.

What has changed? What comes next?

That long, lean period seems far removed from the recent profusion of behav-
ioral science research on climate change, as seen in this special issue (Sovacool,
2014). The efforts of the dogged individuals who fanned the embers and made
that research possible deserve a systematic account. What follows is my assess-
ment of what has changed, what has not and where the opportunities lie for
strengthening the three kinds of connection. The next section considers the
institutional changes needed to realize them.

Integrating behavioral science in climate models

The behavioral sciences have, as yet, made limited contact with the models that
are climate science’s core activity. In part, that failure reflects the impenetrabil-
ity of the models and the forums where their details are debated, except for
scientists deeply steeped in them. In part, it reflects the models’ focus on vari-
ables with planetary effects. As a result, individual behavior appears only in

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 Making behavioral science integral to climate science and action 447

aggregate form (e.g., energy consumption, land use), treating the behavioral
processes that shape those estimates as a black box.
Behavioral scientists might close this gap in several ways. One is by produ-
cing estimates of variables already in the models. A second is by showing how
behavioral variables fit into climate models, refining existing relationships or
adding missing ones. A third is by evaluating the behavioral realism of the sty-
lized scenarios that modelers use to depict climate futures (Keepin, 1984;
Thompson, 1984). A fourth is by doing the integration themselves, aggregating
individual behaviors to planetary-scale variables (e.g., Dietz & Rosa, 1997).
Each of these activities would stretch our science and require immersion in
the world of climate models.

Making climate science more relevant to climate decisions

Making any science useful requires two-way communications with those who
depend on it. People need to know what scientists have learned. Scientists need
to know what decisions people face. In the climate arena, behavioral scientists
have had some success in making the former connection, but little in the latter.
For the former, there is a great, and growing, body of theoretically informed,
empirically tested knowledge on communicating about climate change, its
effects and the response options – as seen in other articles in this issue. That
research has found its way to the mass media, advocacy organizations,
school curricula and informal science education.
Behavioral scientists have, however, achieved little in communicating deci-
sion-makers’ needs to climate scientists. Awareness of those needs can be
seen in attempts to downscale climate science predictions, as in the regional
and sectoral impact analyses of the Third and Fourth US National Climate
Assessments (US Global Change Research Program, 2014, 2018). However,
those efforts are largely guided by experts’ intuitions about decision-makers’
needs. Behavioral scientists could inform those intuitions by summarizing
and interpreting public concerns. The perceived value of listening to the
public may, ironically, be undermined by research emphasizing how much it
needs to know.

Treating climate science as a behavioral endeavor

Decision-makers need to know how much random and systematic error there is
in the science reported to them. Random error reflects cumulative uncertainty
from the data and theories in the analyses (Manski, 2013). Systematic error
reflects biases arising from practices such as making conservative estimates,
excluding questionable data and ignoring issues that fall outside analytical
bounds. Behavioral science on these issues has found its way into climate

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 448 BARUCH FISCHHOFF

science through expert elicitation, which uses behavioral methods to extract

experts’ beliefs and assess their validity (Morgan, 2017). Future research
might extend those methods to characterizing sources of uncertainty and the
trustworthiness of the research process (Fischhoff & Davis, 2014;
Spiegelhalter, 2017; van der Bles et al., 2019).
Decision-makers also need analyses that reflect their values on issues such as
how distributional effects are treated; whether future lives and environmental
effects are discounted along with future monetary ones; and whether estimates
are ‘conservative’ (and what exactly that means). These are familiar topics in
other domains, but they are only beginning to penetrate climate science (e.g.,
Thomas et al., 2018). In order to represent public concerns, behavioral scien-
tists would have to be at the table when analyses are formulated. Such invita-
tions require trusted personal relations arising from joint service on consensus
panels, review committees, interdisciplinary conferences and the like. If we
could create those relationships, we might help climate scientists to perform
and report the research that is most relevant to the public that needs and sup-
ports them.
Over the past 15 years, behavioral scientists have made important contribu-
tions to raising awareness of climate science and its predictions. They have also
been enlisted in promoting and implementing policies deemed to mitigate
climate changes (e.g., energy conservation, renewables, carbon offsets) or
adapt to them (e.g., land-use planning, disaster response). Their greatest
future contributions may lie in further shaping policies. The next section dis-
cusses the institutional supports needed to make that happen.

What will make it happen?

Figure 1 and Box 1 summarize a report calling for behavioral research that
would make these three kinds of connection. That report recognized that
achieving such “an unprecedented interdisciplinary research effort” (Figure 1)
would require extraordinary institutional support. There are historical exam-
ples of behavioral sciences coming together to address major societal chal-
lenges, such as war, immigration and economic distress (e.g., Lazarsfeld,
1949; Bar-Gal, 1998; Reynolds & Tansey, 2003). There is also systematic
study of boundary organizations intended to coordinate such activities (e.g.,
O’Mahony & Bechky, 2008). Based on my reading of these sources, and my
personal experience, behavioral science can play a central role in climate
science and policy if it can connect itself to the dominant climate science in
these three ways. Doing so will require sustained investments in learning
climate science, getting to know climate scientists and becoming part of their

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 Making behavioral science integral to climate science and action 449

activities. These will require changes in relations with the climate sciences and
within the behavioral sciences (Hein et al., 2018).
The behavioral sciences are much more welcome today than in much of the
past. However, their designated roles are often subservient ones: tell the stories
emerging from climate science research; persuade or induce people to take
actions deemed climate friendly; or mobilize the public to defend climate
science. Although these are essential activities that require the behavioral
sciences’ core competencies, they do not engage decision-makers in setting
the research agenda or identifying policies worth analyzing. Indeed, they
may undermine that role by depicting the public as failing to understand
climate science (Fischhoff, 2007).
Progress toward such research can be seen in many places (e.g., Pidgeon
et al., 2014; Stern et al., 2016; Wong-Parodi et al., 2016; Maibach et al.,
2017; van der Linden et al., 2017; Weber, 2017). Some of that research has dir-
ectly involved climate scientists. In addition to ensuring technical accuracy,
such collaborations can also create personal ties that reduce the risk of
members of one discipline reading a bit from another and then assuming
mastery. Some of that research has included behavioral scientists from multiple
disciplines and theoretical perspectives. Such collaborations can not only
address the complexity of decisions (and decision-makers), but also reduce
the temptation to focus on theories rather than problems. Some of that research
has included activists. Such collaborations can not only reduce misunderstand-
ing, but also demonstrate scientists’ personal commitment to practical matters.
All of these collaborations take time away from producing conventional
peer-reviewable publications. Rather, they result in elaborate interventions
whose success or failure is hard to attribute to any of their components.
Disciplinary departments have typically told behavioral scientists with an inter-
est in such activities to take it outside, to applied settings or boundary organi-
zations. That strategy might be defended as protecting the basic research that is
the lifeblood of applications. However, it also cuts that research off from the
reality test of applications and the stimulus that they provide.
An alternative model is to create positions in academic departments that
carry the expectation of both publishing in top journals and being useful, or
joint appointments in departments committed to each. For faculty holding
those positions, time spent with other disciplines and with decision-makers is
not wasted. Rather, it is a capital investment in their ability to change the
world and learn enough about it to identify phenomena worthy of systematic
study. Having such positions might help departments retain idealistic faculty
who want, and are willing, to test the practical value of basic research, while
still contributing to its creation.

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 450 BARUCH FISCHHOFF

Creating such positions would provide academic departments with a prin-

cipled defense against charges of ivory tower isolation. Those positions
would be not just transient concessions to prove relevance, but central to
their mission. Climate change could also provide a reason to change a business
model that has created untenable pressures on work–life balance, rewards for
careerist resume building, oversold claims and exploitative adjunct faculty
positions. Such immersion requires research that is slow, rather than fast-
paced and high volume (Medin et al., 2017). A planetary threat needs an aca-
demic world worthy of the challenge. It might prompt creating one.

Conclusion
Behavioral science has many dual-process theories with heuristic value for
organizing the myriad factors shaping human behavior (Kahneman, 2011).
One process involves fast, associative, pattern-matching, affective responses.
The second involves slow, deliberative, analytical responses. Although some-
times laden with technical details, climate science communications have long
appealed to the former, simpler process. They trust the enormity of the
problem to motivate action. The latter process, which more rationally formu-
lates and evaluates alternative actions, was left to others.
For a while, that strategy worked, winning the hearts of many across society
(Rich, 2019). However, the analyses needed to translate concern to action were
slow in coming, limiting decision-makers’ ability to be as rational as they might
want to be. Climate scientists naturally wanted to be sure of their results before
sharing them. However, their silence left large openings to entities accustomed
to making decisions under conditions of uncertainty. Some of those entities saw
clear enough threats to their interests that they had no need to wait before
acting to forestall climate action. They did not hesitate to communicate force-
fully, in science-like language, perhaps relying on behavioral research con-
ducted on their behalf.
Had behavioral science retained its early seat at the climate science table,
would that have made a difference? Figure 1 and Box 1 suggest some of the
strategies that it would have pursued. These strategies emphasize a decision-
making perspective, so that uncertainty need not preclude action; a commit-
ment to the problem, so that disciplinary concerns are secondary; and a
commitment to evidence, so that intuitions are no longer an acceptable basis
for policies and communications. The ensuing research, like that found in
this special issue, has shown that behavior is subject to systematic analysis
and not refractory, as it may seem to those baffled by a seemingly inexplicable
public. That research, coupled with better organization of our own institutions,
might increase the chance of our being consulted on future decisions related to

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 Making behavioral science integral to climate science and action 451

climate (e.g., energy policy, geoengineering) or other great challenges (e.g.,

gene editing, machine learning), and being ready with useful research when
that happens.

Acknowledgments

I thank Neil Donahue, Hadi Dowlatabadi and two anonymous reviewers for excellent
comments. The views expressed are my own.

Financial support

Preparation of this article was supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and
the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and the Social Sciences.

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