Project Grant 2449568

This $297,513 Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (CFDA 47.075) program supports a collaborative research project led by George Mason University that explores how scientific messages about environmental adaptation shape people's decision-making, especially when their beliefs about the environment, politics, and other issues are interconnected.

The project aims to clarify how adaptation choices, such as flood-proofing homes or relocating from high-risk areas, can unintentionally deepen social and economic inequalities. It develops new conceptual frameworks, methodological tools, and survey-based approaches to map "belief networks" - how an individual's attitudes on topics like climate, migration, and social fairness simultaneously influence one another. Through large-scale surveys and communication experiments, the researchers will examine how information targeting specific attitudes affects people's adaptive capacity and motivation. The project integrates these empirical studies with new network science methods to analyze individual-level belief systems at scale, providing computational and statistical tools to extract, model, and compare complex attitude linkages. This multifaceted effort seeks to improve public understanding of climate risks, foster more informed decision-making, and promote inclusive, effective adaptation strategies.