Insight

INTRODUCTION

Resilience, adaptability, and transformability are key concepts in sustainability science because they all relate to society’s capacity to cope with events, often caused by human activities (Holling 1973, Carpenter et al. 2001, Walker et al. 2004, 2006, Wilson et al. 2013, Meerow et al. 2016, Zanotti et al. 2020), which negatively impact human well-being. Resilience is an intrinsic property of a given system that encompasses all social and ecological interactions. It enables this system to withstand perturbations through different internal processes such as planning, absorption, recovery, and adaptation (National Academy of Science 2012). The resilience concept finds its roots in physics (Thurston 1874) and psychology (Werner and Smith 1982) and was then extended to other fields, including ecology, through the introduction of ecological resilience that considered several alternate states (Holling 1973, 1978), and engineering, with its definition of resilience that focuses on a system’s return to its initial and unique equilibrium (Pimm 1984). Despite their diversity, most studies exhibit the same rationale in their approaches and definitions. They focus on the processes that maintain the system in a particular regime. They identify thresholds that, once crossed, prevent these existing processes from maintaining the system in that regime. Finally, they identify processes that enable the system to move toward an alternative desirable regime.

Decision-making tools to support sustainable management of social-ecological systems (SES) should consider all key interactions between the biophysical and the social systems that determine the focal resilience domain. Indeed, the resilience of SES depends on resilient ecosystems, resilient built environments, resilient social systems, and resilient people. Here, we focus on the last two because they are difficult to measure, may be invisible, and dynamically interact in complex ways, with potential for abrupt changes caused by the dynamics (shocks) of the system. However, because physical properties are typically easier to observe than cognitive processes, decision makers often miss key interactions involving cognitive processes, and therefore design policies based on an insufficient representation of the systems to manage. For instance, sensors can monitor the appearance of cracks in a bridge according to (inter-)national standards but monitoring the “cracks” in people (e.g., due to the pressures caused by an extreme event) is much more challenging because there are no such standards for tracking the well-being of individuals. Therefore, because subtle psychological and social processes have received less attention, we focus on social-psychological barriers that slow or prevent recovery toward desirable states after a perturbation.

For this purpose, we ground our analysis in a psychological concept, called “desilience,” which was introduced as an antagonism to resilience (Pourtois et al. 2012). Desilience is defined as “a process through which the subject constructs a new development trajectory by renouncing, voluntarily or not, any prospect of positive psychosocial fulfillment” (Pourtois et al. 2012:20-21 [author’s translation from the French original]). This “negative” development is also related to the dysfunctional reintegration of the resiliency model developed by Richardson and colleagues (1990, 2002). The key issue lies in the nature of the development: in contrast to resilience, which results in a positive new psychological development, desilience will lead to a negative new psychological development. We attempt to apply the concept of desilience to sustainability science in the way it has been used in psychology, while acknowledging that processes that reduce resilience also have a parallel history in sustainability sciences (Folke 2006). In that line of work, resilience refers to the capacity of a system to deal with change and continue to develop. We focus here on situations in which some social-ecological systems do not recover after a perturbation despite an apparent capacity to do so. We focus particularly on cognitive processes, hence our use of the term desilience borrowed from psychology. We wish to understand and highlight if and how such systems have developed specific mechanisms, which, over time, prevent them from recovering from a perturbation or moving out of an undesirable regime. Neglecting, underestimating, or simply ignoring those mechanisms may prevent recovery to the desired regime and, by definition, severely reduce or even destroy the resilience of the desired regime. Indeed, perturbations may change not only the dynamics of ecological systems but also the psychology of individuals in a dynamical way, leading to the emergence of unexpected social-psychological barriers to resilience. To the best of our knowledge, the dynamics and emergence of social-psychological processes after a perturbation and their interactions with the underlying SES have seldom been addressed in the literature, although analyzing SES resilience requires the incorporation of social-psychological processes.

SOCIAL-PSYCHOLOGICAL BARRIERS AND RESILIENCE

Resilience can be viewed as an emergent system property (Bergström and Dekker 2014) with different processes at a variety of scales. More specifically, some studies have focused on the link between micro and macro scales through the lens of complexity and have highlighted the role of distributed cognition as well as joint cognitive activity, for example (Bergström and Dekker 2014). We argue that we need to analyze emergent barriers in a similar way, by highlighting the role of psychological (at the individual level) and social (at the collective level) processes. Indeed, some studies have focused on psychological barriers and the attitude-behavior gap for climate change (Vieira et al. 2023) but few studies, to the best of our knowledge, analyze the main social-psychological barriers at both individual and collective levels. Beyond processes like adaptation and learning that promote resilience (Walker et al. 2004, Folke 2006), other studies focus on the processes that limit resilience (Leichenko et al. 2015) or reinforce the resilience of undesirable states like SES “traps” where the notion of “trap” connotes negative resilience or undesirable resilience (Lade et al. 2017, Dornelles 2020). For example, an SES trap (Carpenter and Brock 2008) describes a situation where reinforcing feedbacks maintain (“trap” or “lock”) an SES in an undesirable regime. Two main types of SES traps have been highlighted: rigidity traps (highly connected and inflexible institutions and social structures) and poverty traps (low connectivity, capacity, and resilience). The concept of SES traps is closely linked to feedbacks, control, and adaptive capacity (Carpenter and Brock 2008).

Escaping traps requires a fundamental system transformation in order to change the reinforcing SES feedbacks supporting the “trap state.” For instance, in an example of East African reef fisheries from Cinner (2011), poverty leads to the overfishing of herbivorous fishes. These fishes graze coral reefs and thus remove algae limiting coral recruitment that are crucial for fish habitats. Hence fish removal leads to further declines in fish populations. Coral recruitment is also impacted by destructive gear. This vicious cycle of decreasing fish populations amplifies poverty, overfishing, and habitat destruction, thus creating a poverty trap. Escaping this trap would require, for example, poverty reduction and investments in institutions to create incentives to protect herbivorous fishes as well as using selective gear for saving coral habitats (Cinner 2011). In contrast, some other SES are not obviously trapped by the types of processes frequently identified in the literature and seem to have an observable capacity for recovery yet they do not recover because of other unobserved processes. Indeed, the capacity for recovery after a perturbation depends on the interaction of biophysical and institutional properties with social-psychological processes. These social-psychological processes may be positive, negative, or neutral. Positive processes enable adaptation that favors system recovery. Negative processes that may be caused by indifference leading to inaction despite a climate emergency, for instance, may limit system recovery. Developing sustainable policies hinges on our ability to assess all such potential positive and negative social-psychological processes that underlie the capacity for action. This is particularly true when these processes do not exist before an extreme event and dynamically emerge, more or less slowly, after the perturbation. In what follows, we aim to develop and analyze these processes, their origins, and some potential solutions. For clarity, the main results of our analysis are summarized in Table 1 (on social-psychological processes at the individual level) and Table 2 (on social-psychological processes at the collective level) to which we will refer throughout the paper. Note that the degrees of documentation about the barriers differ depending on the relative abundance of studies published in the literature.

UNCOVERING THE HIDDEN PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESSES OF RESILIENCE BARRIERS

The concept of ecological resilience used in sustainability science builds on the notion of multiple, dynamically evolving attractors (Holling 1973, 1978). When a system finds itself at the border between two possible attractors, small disturbances or internal dynamics occurring at different time scales can cause the system to switch from one attractor to another. These attractors are, of course, abstract concepts, nearly impossible to measure or predict in detail. This is especially true when we only consider standard types of feedbacks (e.g., economic, ecological, or institutional ones) for analyzing the system while there are additional hidden psychological feedbacks (e.g., denial after an extreme event) acting in the system. From the above reasoning, any system state may be characterized by many more hidden interactions and reinforcing mechanisms than what is perceived to influence the development of the SES. Although stakeholders’ perspectives are biased and incomplete because of these hidden processes, they must still use this limited knowledge to make decisions. For instance, stakeholders’ understanding of the system may convince them that they are in a resilient regime while many factors unknown to them could increase or reduce resilience. We focus on these factors, the social-psychological barriers, that are the collection of systemic processes outside of our immediate awareness, which reduce resilience, adaptability, and transformability. These systemic processes are not perceived, not only because of unawareness of their existence, but also because they do not actually exist before the perturbation but, instead emerge during or after the perturbation. Thus, unlike traditional resilience analysis that often assumes a static model for human behavior or ignores them, human behavior is, in reality, dynamic and, if perturbed, can change the fundamental dynamics of the SES. These social-psychological processes could explain why the system was not as resilient as we had hoped. Indeed, designing and implementing sustainable policies hinges on being able to assess these hidden processes. For instance, it is unclear how decision processes can deal with people’s cognitive and affective systems because many psychological processes cannot be anticipated and assessed and are therefore difficult to act upon. To explore this issue, we ground our analysis on work done in psychology (Werner and Smith 1982, Martin-Breen and Anderies 2011, Pourtois et al. 2012, Fletcher and Sarkar 2013, Hobman and Walker 2015).

EMERGENCE OF ACTIVE AND PASSIVE SOCIAL-PSYCHOLOGICAL BARRIERS AT THE INDIVIDUAL LEVEL

Active processes (barriers 1, 2, and 3 in Table 1) correspond to inappropriate actions of human actors after a perturbation. Hereafter, we highlight three barriers we found in the literature: disproportionate responses, intolerance of uncertainty, and psychological reactance.

Disproportionate responses (barrier 1, Table 1), i.e., over- or under-reaction (Howlett and Kemmerling 2017, Maor et al. 2017, Peters et al. 2017), may occur as an emotional response to perturbation, or an over (under)-reaction triggered by different processes. For instance, climate under-reaction of governments can be explained as long as they can manage or avoid blame for undesirable feedbacks (Howlett and Kemmerling 2017). An over-reactive decision maker may want to immediately manage the disturbance based on inaccurate or incomplete knowledge. For instance, Anderies et al. (2018) outline an approach for analyzing the role of knowledge infrastructure in maintaining safe operating spaces in exploited ecosystems. In this case, policies may not be properly adapted because some characteristics of social-ecological systems are over- or under-estimated (Anderies et al. 2018): overestimating carrying capacity (practically impossible to quantify precisely) may push decision makers to exploit the ecological system despite its inability to cope with such a level of exploitation given exogenous shocks. This is an obvious example, which is theoretically equivalent to underestimating the impact of a perturbation on people’s capacity to act. Another example relies on the recommendations to wear masks at the beginning of the COVID pandemic: these recommendations differed between countries because of incomplete knowledge about behavioral responses to such a policy at a larger scale. After a few months, as more empirical observations were analyzed, more countries recommended wearing masks. Inappropriate reaction may be caused by unknown consequences of the disturbance. In this case, the manager underestimates the capacity of the system to resist the imposed perturbation and provides a response out of proportion, which wastes resources and potentially “breaks” the system. The millennium bug is an example of overreaction. It triggered substantial preparations but turned out to be a non-issue, indicating that society might have over-prepared. Inappropriate reaction can result from a rational strategy or a strong emotional reaction (e.g., fear, anxiety).

Intolerance of uncertainty (IU; barrier 2, Table 1) can been defined as “a dispositional characteristic that results from a set of negative beliefs about uncertainty and its implications and involves the tendency to react negatively on an emotional, cognitive, and behavioral level to uncertain situations and events” (Buhr and Dugas 2009:216). Uncertainty intolerance is linked to decision rigidity in the sense that individuals are less likely to change their decision when faced with new information (Jensen et al. 2014). Higher levels of intolerance of uncertainty are associated with a tendency to select the immediately available, but less valuable and less probable rewards (Luhmann et al. 2011). This phenomenon could in some cases lead decision makers to multiply inefficient decisions and erratic behaviors.

Psychological reactance (barrier 3 in Table 1) refers to defense mechanisms that appear when people think that their freedom is threatened (Steindl et al. 2015). For instance, in the case of climate change, communications about the importance of climate change and how to mitigate it can be viewed as a limitation of freedom for some people, yielding an opposite effect of what these communications intend (Chan and Lin 2022). In this line, Moser (2016) questions our practices in terms of climate change communication, by highlighting remaining challenges such as the people’s understanding of climate change. Psychological reactance may also explain the protests against governmental restrictions during the COVID pandemic: some people protested against costly restrictions leading to bankruptcies, unemployment, and lost opportunities, whereas other people simply refused to accept the global emergency. All inappropriate actions may cause large losses of resources in the long term, leading to an unwanted system transformation.

Passive psychological processes relate to the inaction of human actors after a perturbation (see barriers 4a, 4b and 4c in Table 1). Inaction may be a deliberate choice because its cost is estimated to be lower than the cost of action. Behavioral scientists have focused attention on inaction specifically related to climate change. Gifford (2011), for example, points to many psychological barriers against climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Some people are indifferent (barrier 4a, Table 1) to climate change because they do not realize how it may affect their daily lives, or they do not know enough about its consequences. Indifference and lack of knowledge may, in turn, occur because climate change impacts are not directly visible to people living in less-exposed countries. This low climate change risk perception may be a psychological barrier to energy conservation behavior as shown by a Canadian survey (Lacroix and Gifford 2018). Another key process in indifference stems from our automatic behaviors (James 1899). People may reflect on costs and benefits of some issues, but most often, they act without deeper reflection in an automatic way (Kahneman 2011). Even if they have intentions to act, people may fail to follow through because of habits (Steg and Vlek 2009). Such heuristics have evolved over thousands of years to work in our favor (Czerlinski et al. 1999), e.g., our flight response that activates without taking time to reflect on the costs and benefits of getting eaten by large predators. However, in the grand challenges we are currently facing, these heuristics may work against us at a societal level. Lack of visceral response has been proposed as an explanation for inaction related to climate change (Weber 2006). Indeed, given the current situation, people’s failure to reflect and deliberate over the consequences of their (in)actions and automatic behaviors, may prevent the behavioral change we need.

Denial (barrier 4b, Table 1) is defined as a defense mechanism that involves refusal to accept reality because the short-term cost of action may be too high. For example, the personal cost of accepting the current environmental challenge and dramatically changing lifestyle may feel too high, especially if it goes against one’s social identity (Tajfel and Turner 1979, Fielding and Hornsey 2016). The idea that there is a “finite pool of worry” could also explain inaction against an environmental crisis. According to this hypothesis, environmental concerns would diminish, as other worries become prominent (Weber 2015). Finally, denial may occur because the benefits of action may be considered so uncertain in the long term that discount rates follow hyperbolic discounting (Laibson 1997), resulting in a status quo bias (Weber 2015). Denial may also cause resistance to change in the case of climate change (Jost 2015).

Hopelessness (barrier 4c, Table 1) may also drive inactive behaviors and could explain why some people become disengaged with issues (Hmielowski et al. 2019). Any of these passive barriers may result in substantial periods of inaction, leading to delayed or even no recovery. Psychological costs may add to standard economic costs. For example, if inaction does not resonate with one’s personal values, it may cause cognitive dissonance. In that case, either actions or values must change to avoid any personal displeasure. Hence, persistent inaction may trigger new negative development of values to cope with cognitive dissonance.

Passive and active psychological processes are not mutually exclusive. Both can be involved in the same outcome, and the same internal factor, e.g., lack of knowledge, can cause both types. For instance, locus of control may cause passive or active barriers. Locus of control theory (Fukuzawa and Inamasu 2020) analyzes the relationships between how people believe they are in control and their behavior and attitude when they face uncertain events. People exhibiting high internal locus of control may base decisions to act or not based on how they value respective outcomes. In contrast, a person with low internal locus of control will likely choose inaction because they believe action will not guarantee a specific outcome anyway.

EMERGENCE OF SOCIAL-PSYCHOLOGICAL BARRIERS AT THE COLLECTIVE LEVEL: A HINDER TO ADAPTABILITY

In the remainder of the paper, we propose to extend these insights by analyzing social processes at the collective level. “Collective barriers” may emerge from social interactions between people and reduce adaptability (Walker et al. 2004). For instance, in a case study in northwestern Pakistan, Nixon et al. (2022) showed that social influence (especially from family members) may impact water governance. Although we focused on psychological processes at the individual scale in the previous section, we propose here to explore emerging social-psychological processes that may destroy resilience at the collective level. Social interactions contribute to the spread of ideas and opinions but also values, norms, beliefs, and behaviors. Thus, social interactions can leverage the passive and active individual processes highlighted in the previous section. In what follows, we present a non-exhaustive list of social barriers we identified in the literature.

In social psychology, pluralistic ignorance (barrier 1, Table 2) is a collective illusion that refers to the misperception of others’ opinion. For example, a minority position can be perceived as the majority position in the population, or the other way around. Concerning climate change, evidence suggests that 80–90% of North Americans underestimate the prevalence of support for major climate change mitigation policies and climate concern among the general population of the USA (Sparkman et al. 2022). This can lead people to act on a perceived false reality and, in the case of climate change, to publicly restrict their support to mitigate it (O’Gorman 1975).

Lack of community collective efficacy (barrier 2, Table 2) refers to people’s shared beliefs about their group’s capabilities to accomplish collective tasks (Thaker et al. 2016). For example, if people do not believe in the efficacy of collective action regarding common management of water supplies, this may affect their willingness to act to secure water supplies (Thaker et al. 2016).

Evidence from coastal areas suggests that coastal communities with strong social capital are more positive to climate policies (Jones and Clark 2013). Hence a lack of community social capital (barrier 3, Table 2), representing lack of social capital within a community, may also affect climate change mitigation. Social capital in community development also plays an important role for climate change mitigation and disaster risk reduction initiatives (Bernados and Ocampo 2023).

Collective narcissism (Cichocka et al. 2023) may provide an inflated image of the in-group that is contingent upon external recognition of the group’s worth and may cause defensive group attachment (barrier 4, Table 2): national collective narcissism was significantly associated with climate change conspiracy beliefs, which mediated the positive relation between national collective narcissism and distrust of climate science (Bertin et al. 2021).

Group and system status quo maintenance motives (barrier 5, Table 2) concern groups with higher status, which thus have more to gain from protecting the status quo: in this case they tend to be less concerned about climate change (Mackay et al. 2021). This question has been broadly analyzed through the lens of inequalities (Baland and Platteau 1999, Phillips 2017). Inequalities emerge because of asymmetries in, for example, social, market, and political power (Phillips 2017). The main issue relates to who benefits from the system: there are some correlations (and causalities) between concentrations of wealth, power, and how inequalities can be maintained. It is particularly true for the case of climate change: the wealthiest are less vulnerable to climate change and are also mainly responsible for CO₂ emissions. At the country level, climate change impacts low-income countries more than other countries. Furthermore, efforts required to mitigate climate change can, at least temporarily, slow down economic growth (Taconet et al. 2020), hence risking further exacerbation of income inequalities. This status quo can be expressed by lobbying in the discussion between politicians and stakeholder groups that could also lead to collective barriers. For example, in the case of the Waxman-Markey bill in the United States, lobbying activities related to climate policy significantly reduced the estimation of the expected impacts to US$60 billion (Meng and Rode 2019).

A collective resistance to responsibilization (barrier 6, Table 2) may also emerge in the case of climate change. For instance, Döbbe and Cederberg (2023) have highlighted four mechanisms related to climate change and responsible consumption: (1) claims challenging the truth around responsible consumption; (2) demanding more responsible consumption; (3) constructing the misled consumer; and (4) rejecting vilification of cattle farming.

Group polarization (barrier 7, Table 2) is the tendency for groups to make decisions or have opinions that are more extreme than the ones made by members alone (Isenberg 1986, Hogg et al. 1990). Group polarization can be explained by group norms emerging from collective involvement and group participation (see Zhu 2013, in the case of CEO decision making) and is more likely to happen when members of a group share a common identity value (see Elgesem 2017 in the case of blogging about the Paris agreement). A survey (Ehret et al. 2018) on prospective voters has also shown how bipartisanship may help understand polarization of climate policy.

Finally, group shift or risky shift (barrier 8, Table 2) refers to group decisions that are sometimes more risky than individual decisions, depending on various factors. For instance, Brunette et al. (2015) show decisions from a “unanimity rule”-based group are riskier than decisions from a “majority rule”-based group.

HOW TO DEAL WITH SOCIAL-PSYCHOLOGICAL BARRIERS IN SOCIAL-ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS’ MANAGEMENT?

Environmental policies are generally designed to achieve specific targets. Policy makers inevitably face information constraints, related, for example, to how they can infer a conceptual system model, based only on current system observations and past experience. These “observability” issues may involve the emergence of resilience barriers related to the policy makers’ own cognition and their failure to consider social-psychological processes in people’s response to policy. Improving observability and understanding how resilience barriers affect system dynamics are therefore essential for achieving true societal improvements. If policy makers assess the effects of potential social-psychological processes, they may adapt policies to integrate these processes in the policy cycle.

To better understand the dynamics of social-psychological barriers in system management, we illustrate in Figure 1 how they may play out in one example related to stakeholders’ perceived utility of CO₂ mitigation. For instance, let’s consider that the utility of mitigating CO₂ increases with time and constitutes our realized utility function (green curve). Social-psychological processes may shape this utility function in different ways (red curves): no action, like indifference, may ignore such utility function (utility of CO₂ is therefore null in the upper left quadrant); psychological reactance may invert it (upper right quadrant) whereas disproportionate response may over-estimate it (lower left quadrant); intolerance of uncertainty may increase variation in the utility function (lower right quadrant). Active and passive dynamics can both be pictured as discrepancies between an ideal situation’s social objectives and policy actions, as well as an outcome resulting from flawed collective objectives and inappropriate actions due to misconceived reality.

For example, a passive barrier can occur through processes of indifference. Indifference may arise because people’s utility function does not incorporate some elements, such as CO₂ concentration, even though these elements can influence their well-being. This results in policy outcomes that do not address the appropriate problems: decision makers do not put in place policies for reducing CO₂ emissions or consumers do not react to CO₂ labelling of products. In contrast, in a psychological reactance process, people believe that emissions of greenhouse gases are only associated with activities that are good (or neutral or not so bad) for society and have no negative impacts. This results in action that can be completely opposite to what would be best if people could fully perceive the impact of these emissions: decision makers put in place subsidies for using coal, individuals lobby to maintain harmful activities (Oreskes and Conway 2010).

Responses based on active barriers could be explained by a perceived high risk of bad outcomes. The process of overreaction may be viewed as a disproportionate policy response. For instance, if decision makers think that electric cars bring substantial utility increase (overestimation), the policy response may be systematically biased leading to overdesigned policy instruments such as overestimated carbon tax for avoiding pollutant cars or overestimated subsidies for encouraging the purchase of electric cars. Under-reaction may be at the origin of inappropriate policies too, as shown in Figure 1: in this case, governments may manage blame to avoid some expensive actions, for instance.

SOLUTIONS FOR MITIGATING SOCIAL-PSYCHOLOGICAL BARRIERS

Refined analyses of potential social-psychological barriers in isolation may help decision makers design better policies. However, processes are almost always entangled, so positive developments in some dimensions may be associated with negative developments in others. As in the case of resilience, such barriers emerge from multiple processes evolving over time, building on past experience. As with policies, past experiences and learning processes may result in desirable development in some dimensions and undesirable development in others. Therefore policy makers should study not only past episodes leading to desired outcomes that built up resilience, but also episodes that trigger social-psychological processes such as denial. Policy makers need to improve their social-ecological understanding of the system in which such barriers have emerged. For instance, in the case of poverty in small-scale fisheries, case studies in India and Brazil (Nayak et al. 2014) illustrate the role of different processes (e.g., economic exclusion, social marginalization, class exploitation, and political disempowerment) in poverty emergence and traps. Freeman et al. (2020) highlight how social and general intelligence can be implemented and may improve collective action in a common pool resource system through the lens of cognitive ability and the diversity of social interactions. Another issue hinges on decreasing representational gaps that may yield conflict management (Cronin and Weingart 2007) caused by a diversity of value systems and beliefs that may lead to stalled positions and conflict. In some previously cited solutions, the emphasis on social-psychological processes is not uniformly evident. Therefore, we propose a comprehensive review that specifically examines these processes to connect social-psychological barriers to their potential causes and solutions. This exercise is not intended to be exhaustive, especially as it shows that some barriers have been more addressed than others. We identified many causes, and we connect these causes to solutions highlighted in the literature. Nevertheless, we acknowledge that numerous social-psychological mechanisms may not be fully accounted for; henceforth, it is imperative to consider this work primarily as a method for analyzing barriers to resilience.

Solutions for social-psychological barriers at the individual level

Here we focus on psychological barriers, their solutions, and their causes described in Table 1. Disproportionate responses (barrier 1, Table 1), previously described, may be caused by strong emotional reactions, such as fear, which may affect decision making (Haegler et al. 2010), or climate anxiety that affects mental health (Clayton 2020). Solutions exist to decrease the effects of these emotional reactions such as behavioral techniques to reduce fear (Adler et al. 1998), or present-moment focus for anxiety (Khoury et al. 2015). Overconfidence (Johnson and Fowler 2011) or unrealistic optimism (Jefferson et al. 2017) may also cause disproportionate reaction because of over estimation. Accuracy feedback and anticipated group discussion may reduce overconfidence (Arkes et al. 1987) and exposure to counterevidence (Jefferson et al. 2017) may reduce unrealistic optimism. In the same vein, exposure to knowledge (Jefferson et al. 2017) could help overcome lack of knowledge that may cause disproportionate reaction because knowing the causes, impacts, and responses to climate change may influence climate change risk perceptions (Van der Linden 2015). Many cognitive biases can also trigger over/under reaction like attentional bias or status quo bias, which require some adapted debiasing tools (see Zhao and Luo 2021 for a complete review of cognitive bias in the case of climate change). In the same vein, non-appropriate reactions can be intolerance of uncertainty (barrier 2 in Table 1) that can be caused by neuroticism (McEvoy and Mahoney 2012), defined as the tendency to experience negative emotions, need for closure (Berenbaum et al. 2008) that corresponds to the desire or motivation to have a definite answer instead of uncertainty or doubt, or perceived threat (Bavolar et al. 2023). Cognitive behavior therapy targeting intolerance of uncertainty (CBT-IU) can be used for alleviating it (Wilson et al. 2023) in general and not necessarily at its root.

Psychological reactance (barrier 3 in Table 1) may be involved if an individual feels a personal threat (Shen 2015) or to protect a conservative political orientation (Ma et al. 2019). These effects can be mitigated by making climate change less abstract and closer to the self (Van Lange and Huckelba 2021).

Non-action barriers have been broken down into three components: indifference (barrier 4a), denial (barrier 4b), and hopelessness (barrier 4c). Education campaigns emphasizing individual contributions to environmental impacts and consumption habits (Dopelt et al. 2021) may make people aware of direct consequences. Cognitive bias (Zhao and Luo 2021) and the associated debiasing tools may affect indifference and denial.

Denial (barrier 4b) can be caused by experiential avoidance (Feather and Williams 2022) defined by the willingness to avoid unpleasant internal experience (e.g., unpleasant emotions, thoughts), and can be mitigated through acceptance training (Chapman et al. 2006). Denial, as a defensive mechanism, can be activated by high perceived cost of prosocial behavior (Tyler et al. 1982). Norm proximity (defined as the perceived distance between individual position and the others’ position) can be used for coping with this cause through conservation behavior (Callery et al. 2021). The willingness to preserve things as they are, defining status quo ideologies (Jylhä and Akrami 2015), may also yield climate change denial through the effect of social dominance orientation and general system justification. Reducing uncertainty threats may mitigate ideological orientations toward the status quo (Federico and Deason 2011). Finally, cultural values may trigger denial through vertical individualism, which corresponds to the conception of an autonomous/independent individual and acceptance of inequality.

The last barrier, hopelessness (barrier 4c, Table 1), can be activated by neuroticism (Morselli 2017), the inability to manage emotional states and negative moods. Internal attribution style corresponds to people who blame themselves after failing because of individual traits and personal characteristics and was found to be a predictor of hopelessness among clinically depressed youth (Becker-Weidman et al. 2009). Finally, hopelessness can be mitigated by enhancing attributional style for positive events (i.e., make stable, global attributions; Voelz et al. 2003), through optimism and hope training (Luthans et al. 2008), or cognitive behavior therapy and life review interventions (Hernandez and Overholser 2021).

Solutions for social psychological barriers at the collective level

Here we focus on social barriers, their causes, and their solutions described in Table 2. For instance, group identification (Prentice and Miller 1996) can cause pluralistic ignorance (barrier 1, Table 2) when people strive to behave as a good group member and believe that other group members’ behavior reflects their personal beliefs and values. Educating about pluralistic ignorance may reduce it (Schroeder and Prentice 1998). A recent study in North Carolina (USA) about the influence of intergenerational learning on the perception of climate change (Lawson et al. 2019) shows that childhood education may increase climate change concerns among their parents. Fazey et al. (2007) also show the contribution of education to develop adaptive qualities to build and maintain social-ecological resilience in individuals. Beyond education, “governments should provide community-based opportunities that give individuals access to both environmental and personal resources that develop their resilience in meaningful ways” (Fletcher and Sarkar 2013:20) such as “public education campaigns, mentorship programs for youth, and social groups for the elderly” (Fletcher and Sarkar 2013:20). Finally, education is the single strongest predictor of climate change awareness (and risk perceptions) showing the need for “improving basic education, climate literacy, and public understanding of the local dimensions of climate change [that] are vital to public engagement and support for climate action” (Lee et al. 2015:1014).

Poor social cohesion may affect collective efficacy (barrier 2, Table 2; Gearhart and Joseph 2019). Informal social control that leads people to conform and to behave according to internalized normative standards, has shown to be strongly connected to social cohesion (Gau 2014) and may therefore improve collective efficacy within a community. Community social capital (barrier 3, Table 2) can be limited if community perceptions are negative, social connections limited, and trust low (Jones and Clark 2013). Communities in flood-prone areas in Puerto-Rico (Lopez-Marrero and Tschakert 2011) are directly affected by drainage channels and their maintenance, overseen by government agencies or by a few members of the community. In this case study, Lopez-Marrero and Tschakert (2011) show that resilience to floods may be fostered, if community members overcome mutual distrust and lack of confidence for cleaning and maintaining channels to promote efficient collaborations between community and emergency managers. These latter examples show that community-building efforts (Mattessich 2014) and increasing social cohesion (Bernados and Ocampo 2023) may be a solution for lack of community social capital. However, note that social cohesion may also have negative impacts (resistance to change): for instance, high-cohesion communities may not adapt effectively to environmental changes, potentially yielding negative impacts on health (Cherng et al. 2019).

Defensive group attachment (barrier 4, Table 2) can have several causes: low self-esteem and vulnerable self-image (Golec de Zavala et al. 2020), belonging to a disadvantaged group (Golec de Zavala et al. 2009, Bagci et al. 2023), or shorter experience with nationhood, as in postcolonial countries and lower levels of globalization (Cichocka et al. 2023), as well as intergroup threat and threat to social identity (Golec de Zavala 2023). The solution to this barrier is to reduce intergroup bias and to foster a common population identity (Gaertner et al. 1993).

Collective status quo (barrier 5, Table 2) can be caused by the willingness to keep either a positive image of the group (Jost and Hunyady 2003, Jost et al. 2004, Jost 2015) or a given biological or social hierarchy (Sidanius and Pratto 1999, Tibbetts et al. 2022). Note that this status quo can also be generated by beliefs in a just world (Lerner 2003): people need to believe in a just world (everyone deserves what they have). People may justify status quo to defend their beliefs, especially when they are confronted with injustice (Lerner 2003). A solution relies on reducing uncertainty and security threats (Federico and Deason 2011).

Challenging knowledge and truth claims may cause collective resistance to making consumers responsible (barrier 6, Table 2) as shown in the case of food consumption and CO₂ emission (Döbbe and Cederberg 2023). Indeed, people may mobilize some counter knowledge and voice their skepticism. Social-political identities and cohesion can trigger such skepticism, as public division about climate change in the U.S. illustrates (Bliuc et al. 2015). Note that we didn’t find any solution to barrier 6 in the literature.

Group polarization (barrier 7, Table 2) is based on the willingness to be part of a group (Isenberg 1986), especially when conformity to a polarized norm emerges (Hogg et al. 1990). Deliberative norms (Strandberg et al. 2019) as well as informal institutions, such as social norms (Nyborg et al. 2016) may also contribute to preventing undesirable transformations, e.g., preventing the emergence of group polarization. Because of uncertainties around climate change, risky shifts (barrier 8, Table 2) may emerge from people with a cultural inclination to risk-taking (e.g., Carlson and Davis 1971) and from populations with diffused responsibility (Forsyth 1990). Brunette et al. (2015) show that unanimity rule instead of majority rule during debates may mitigate these tendencies.

DISCUSSION

Our study exposed multiple social-psychological barriers, some examples of their origin and some proposed solutions. This list of barriers is not exhaustive and is expected to increase in line with future research developments on social-psychological factors related to climate change. However, the rationale “causes-barrier-solutions” bears value to develop future climate policies. Note that all barriers and solutions have not been addressed in the same way in the literature. For example, we found ample evidence of education as a solution to many barriers but we did not find any solution for the collective resistance to responsibilization (barrier 2, Table 2).

These examples illustrate that solutions exist and enable systems to cope with social-psychological barriers. Individual solutions involve approaches that can change the way people relate to their thoughts and automatic patterns. Some of these approaches have been popularized in the West for people suffering from stress, anxiety, or depression (e.g., third wave CBT). However, mindfulness, for example, is aimed primarily at neurotypical individuals, enabling them to distance themselves from their thoughts and emotions in order to regulate them more effectively. Some studies have also shown the benefits of mindfulness for pro-environmental behavior (Colombo et al. 2023) and support for climate adaptation actions (Wamsler and Brink 2018), for example. However, these solutions, and other ones, must also be implemented, either at the individual or collective levels, depending on the efficiency and cost of the solutions. For instance, debiasing tools at the individual levels may be expensive and time intensive processes. Other individual solutions highlighted in this review may be difficult to implement in real life, especially at the population scale. Indeed, as scaling up technologies for mitigating climate change is still challenging (Pacala and Socolow 2004), upscaling individual solutions at the collective scale may require new developments. Some of these solutions are individualized and therapeutic, and would require new approaches to be implemented at population level. Our insights are that developing collective solutions can be inspired by individual solutions but will differ from them. For example, cognitive behavior therapy targeting intolerance of uncertainty cannot feasibly be applied to an entire population. However, individual solutions can be implemented to groups through institutional support such as mindfulness training (individual scale) that can be done at school (classroom level; Meiklejohn et al. 2012) or at the workplace (Johnson et al. 2020). Therefore, even if collective solutions such as education can be implemented with positive results (Fazey et al. 2007, Lawson et al. 2019), upscaling individual solutions to the collective levels requires more efforts and new developments to be effective. However it is important not to oppose individual and collective solutions: changes at the individual scale may change collective dynamics such as social norms (Nyborg et al. 2016) and vice versa. Consequently, solutions must be tailored according to the targeted people or community (e.g., citizens or politicians). For this purpose, assessing effects of solutions and social-psychological barriers is essential. For instance, integrated assessment models should include social-psychological processes to design more effective climate policies taking into account potential barriers (Mathias et al. 2020). Finally, these solutions must incorporate the dynamics of social-psychological processes and the potential for emergence of corresponding barriers to resilience in response to shocks. Previous work has highlighted multiple aspects of the role of general resilience for coping with unexpected events (Carpenter et al. 2012). We suggest that cognitive causes that may generate social-psychological barriers are important elements of general resilience and, ideally, should be accounted for in the design of sustainable policies. One approach relies on managing the conditions under which social-psychological barriers may emerge. Many factors may contribute to these such as cultural values (e.g., Eastern vs Western cultures), political (e.g., type of regime), or socioeconomic context (e.g., economic crisis). Taking measures to prevent such social-psychological barriers constitutes an initial step in addressing the challenge of developing effective sustainable policies to tackle global issues like climate change.

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