There is a strong scientific consensus that anthropogenic climate change is happening and that its impacts can put both ecological and human systems in jeopardy. Social psychology, the scientific study of human behaviours in their social and cultural settings, is an important tool for understanding how humans interpret and respond to climate change. In this article, we offered a systematic review of the social psychological literature of climate change. We sampled 130 studies on climate change or global warming from 80 articles published in journals indexed under the “Psychology, social” category of Journal Citation Reports. Based on this sample, we observe that social psychologists have produced an impressive canon of research on this pressing topic, the strengths of which include diversity of research designs, outcome variables, and theoretical angles. However, there are some gaps in this literature, including weak presence of authors and data from non‐Western, developing, and nondemocratic societies, lack of cross‐cultural comparisons, reliance on young and Amazon MTurk samples, lack of attention to some crucial outcome variables, and overemphasis on intrapersonal and intrapsychic processes. We recommend that future social psychological research on climate change needs to broaden geographical and demographic representation, examine study outcomes other than mitigation behaviour, and adopt more “social” theoretical perspectives. We also offer suggestions as to how these needs can be addressed.

中文翻译：

---

社会心理学出版物中的气候变化研究：系统综述

强烈的科学共识认为，人为的气候变化正在发生，其影响可能使生态系统和人类系统陷入危险之中。社会心理学是对人类在其社会和文化环境中的行为进行的科学研究，是了解人类如何解释和应对气候变化的重要工具。在本文中，我们对气候变化的社会心理学文献进行了系统的回顾。我们从在《期刊引证报告》的“心理学，社会”类别下被索引的期刊中发表的80篇文章中抽取了130项有关气候变化或全球变暖的研究的样本。根据这个样本，我们观察到社会心理学家就这一紧迫的话题进行了令人印象深刻的研究，其优势包括研究设计的多样性，结果变量和理论角度。但是，这些文献中存在一些差距，包括作者和来自非西方，发展中和非民主社会的数据薄弱，缺乏跨文化比较，对年轻和亚马逊MTurk样本的依赖，对某些关键结果的关注不足变量，以及过分强调人际和心理过程。我们建议，未来的有关气候变化的社会心理学研究需要扩大地理和人口统计学的代表范围，检查缓解行为以外的研究成果，并采用更多的“社会”理论观点。