How to Talk About Climate Change Across Political Divides

In an era of increasingly frequent wildfires, hurricanes, floods, and droughts, confronting climate change is a very real experience for many people.

Yet, political progress on the issue is stuck. Stanford researchers are working to bridge the gap by combining psychological and economic insights. Their aim: find how different messages shape attitudes, behaviors, and actions related to climate change.

“What this project is really trying to do is not just one by one test if a communication message is effective, but to really have a holistic approach to pit these different techniques against each other in a tournament and see which one emerges most effective,” said Neil Malhotra, the Edith M. Cornell Professor of Political Economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Malhotra, Robb Willer, a professor of sociology in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences and a professor of organizational behavior (by courtesy) at Stanford GSB, and their collaborators received early funding from the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment’s Environmental Venture Projects.

The team recently published a report of their initial survey findings in Nature Climate Change revealing a surprise for the researchers: Although no messages emerged as making participants more likely to say they would donate money to pro-environmental organizations, several messages reliably influenced attitudes about climate change science and policies among both Democrats and Republicans. Messages emphasizing the scientific consensus that human-caused climate change is happening had the strongest effect on participants’ belief that the world’s temperatures have increased over the past century.

The authors found even this most influential message moved participants’ beliefs by only a few percentage points, however. “These short-term messages are not medical surgeries; they do not permanently fix the problem,” said study lead author Jan Voelkel, an assistant professor of public policy and sociology at Cornell University who started working on the project as a sociology PhD student at Stanford. “Rather, like a session of physical therapy, they show us what would need to change to achieve sustained improvement.”

Coffee and Collaboration

Willer and Malhotra’s partnership was years in the making. Malhotra repeatedly cited Willer’s work on how to change someone’s mind in his own book, Leading With Values: Strategies for Making Ethical Decisions in Business and Life, and they frequently met up at a campus coffee shop to better understand the intersection of their work.

Over their first cup of coffee, Willer asked Malhotra his perceptions of their shared field of political psychology. Malhotra summed up the differences between a political scientist’s approach compared to a psychologist’s: a psychologist will look for things that hold true for all people while a political scientist will examine the institutional systems that make people behave a certain way. The researchers discovered they had a shared interest in how psychology influences political messaging and vice versa.

“We landed on essentially auditing the published literature on climate change messaging,” said Willer. “What are the most impactful, influential strategies of talking to people about climate change? Do those strategies replicate? How do they work?”

Developing the project didn’t come easily. The pair initially struggled to decide on whether they would seek the single best strategy or create a list of effective messages. So, they reached out to Jane Willenbring, an associate professor of Earth and planetary sciences in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, for her input. Frustrated by too-little change in public attitudes, Willenbring wanted to identify the best messaging strategy to tailor her climate messaging to specific audiences while the social scientists, Willer and Malhotra, wanted a list of scalable and effective tactics.

After some debate, the trio found that most other studies only focused on one communication tactic. To set their work apart, they decided to summarize thousands of complex scientific papers and make a digestible ranking of the 10 most-cited climate messaging strategies.

While the team’s recent report shows only modest persuasive effects for the messages it tested, that doesn’t rule out the possibility of swaying people’s actions with untested messages or other approaches altogether, the researchers point out. The researchers plan to test the most effective approaches in field experiments — rather than surveys — to get a sense of what kinds of effects might be possible in real world settings. Their work stands to provide an authoritative perspective, addressing a gap left by outdated studies that do not reflect shifts in climate politics and societal perspectives.

“We’re quite open to not finding that psychological or political psychological techniques are helpful for changing public opinion on climate change,” Willer said. “I’m totally fine with this space being less important in the larger collective multidisciplinary multinational effort to fight climate change, and saying we should dedicate our energies someplace else.”

The original version of this article was published by the Woods Institute for the Environment on January 13, 2026.