{"pk":49365,"title":"The intrinsic drive for knowing boosts pro-environmental choices","subtitle":null,"abstract":"The ongoing climate crisis demands massive changes in people's life style. Behavioral economics has highlighted the use of extrinsic incentives (e.g., money) as a powerful tool for changing behavior. However, external incentives come with significant costs, making them feasible primarily for wealthier countries. Here, following recent insights from the field of curiosity and information-seeking, we explore whether internal incentives such as the intrinsic drive for knowing can motivate people to act more pro-environmentally. By developing a novel decision-making task, we showed that the drive for knowing predicts pro-environmental choices. Moreover, participants chose eco-friendly options more when their values were unknown compared to when they were known. Results from this study hold the potential to inform the development of future behavioral interventions, although a replication of its findings is still ongoing.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Psychology; Behavioral Science; Decision making; Quantitative Behavior"}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3685p1gf","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Irene","middle_name":"","last_name":"Cogliati Dezza","name_suffix":"","institution":"UniversitŽ Libre de Bruxelles","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T10:00:00-08:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49365/galley/37327/download/"}]}