In the face of a slow and inadequate global response to anthropogenic climate change, scholars and journalists frequently claim that human psychology is not designed or evolved to solve the problem, and they highlight a range of “psychological barriers” to climate action. Here, we critically examine this claim and the evidence on which it is based. We identify four key problems with attributing climate inaction to “human nature” or evolved psychological barriers: (a) It minimizes variability within and between populations; (b) it oversimplifies psychological research and its implications for policy; (c) it frames responsibility for climate change in terms of the individual at the expense of the role of other aspects of culture, including institutional actors; and (d) it rationalizes inaction. For these reasons, the message from social scientists must be clear—humans’ current collective failure to tackle climate change on the scale required cannot be explained as a product of a universal and fixed human nature because it is a fundamentally cultural phenomenon, reflecting culturally evolved values, norms, institutions, and technologies that can and must change rapidly.

面对全球对人为气候变化的缓慢和不充分的反应，学者和记者经常声称人类心理学不是为解决问题而设计或进化的，他们强调了气候行动的一系列“心理障碍”。在这里，我们批判性地研究了这一主张及其所依据的证据。我们确定了将气候不作为归因于“人性”或进化的心理障碍的四个关键问题：(b) 它过度简化了心理学研究及其对政策的影响；(c) 它以个人的角度来界定气候变化的责任，而忽视了文化其他方面的作用，包括机构行为者；(d) 它使不作为合理化。由于这些原因，