Psychology and Climate Change

Hi everyone! This week, I made a lot of progress towards gathering some baseline information.

On Tuesday, I spoke to Rebecca Hoeffler, the Communications Coordinator for Duke’s Office of Sustainability! We were able to analyze some of her life experiences in depth in order to understand what psychological factors caused the events she experienced. I also spoke to one of her Green Devil interns, Maddie, who told me about how her experiences with sustainability at Duke differ from those of her hometown. This week was definitely full of interviews – I also got a chance to talk to one of my friends who is involved with sustainability initiatives at a local school in order to observe high school students’ attitudes towards sustainability. She described how the student-led club environment of her school has fostered more unity in fighting climate change!

I also got started on exploring my first book: Facing Climate Change: An Integrated Path to the Future by Jeffrey Kiehl.
It taught me a lot about how the human tendencies to fear change and search for security as well as a culture of individualism in the United States have driven climate inaction.

This past week, I also reached out to many people via email to potentially conduct interviews or get some in person experience. After checking in with my content advisor, Ms. Caruso, I have developed a plan for next week centered around exploring more resources!

Thanks for reading, and I hope you had a great Fourth of July! 🙂

Hello, and welcome to my blog! Here, I will be taking you through the journey of my Independent Study, “Psychological Attitudes towards Climate Change”.

This independent study will be focused specifically on observing what psychological and neurological factors (including a person’s community, thought process, political beliefs, background, etc) influence climate change action, inaction, and skepticism. After researching climate change, neuroscience, and psychology, conducting interviews, and exploring resources both in person and online, my goal is to build a final product (such as an activity or presentation) that leverages the psychological attitudes I have observed to motivate members of my community to more actively work towards combating climate change!

Check out the Proposal page for a more in depth description of this project, and if you’re interested, please subscribe to my blog by scrolling to the bottom of this page! I’ll be updating this weekly with descriptions of what I’ve learned and the progress I’ve made. Thanks, and I hope you enjoy this journey! 🙂

 Below are posts describing the work I’ve done so far, in chronological order starting from the bottom.
Check out the pages above to learn about my interviews, read the notes I’ve taken, and view my Independent study proposal!