Adam Aron

I was a cognitive neuroscientist for 20 years but now focus research on how to achieve a stronger social mobilization to get the policy support to end fossil fuels and to prepare for the climate, ecological and social stresses to come. See my book on the climate crisis here.

I take seriously the prospect of climate breakdown, ecological systems collapse and a disruption of organized human existence within mere decades. Global heating is accelerating and could reach 2 celsius above preindustrial levels before the end of the 2030s, decades sooner than mainstream science has been telling us. Beyond the carbon problem we are superseding 7 of 9 planetary boundaries. There will be increasingly devastating consequences, including loss of corals and other marine life, loss of land ecosystems, millions of human deaths, crises in food supply, and trillions of dollars of damages, as laid out, for example, by recent reports by the Institute of Faculty Actuaries and the British Government. At the same time we have a broader polycrisis, including dramatic economic inequality, technological problem-shifting and a democracy deficit.

The field of psychology can address important and timely questions such as:

• understanding how to better mobilize people into social movements to win the investments and policies that could safeguard ways of life
• understanding human emotion, such as the fear, denial and disavowal that prevents people from feeling, comprehending and acting
• understanding how to help people shift their beliefs in neoliberal values such as individualism, me-first and status-quo privilege, towards imagining alternative collective futures of flourishing.

• Kevin Young, Fabian Dablander & Adam R Aron (in press). ‘From moral motivations to material interests: Building a mass climate movement through transformative adaptation’. Energy Research and Social Science

•  Raihan Alam, Maxwell Lyons, Tiffany Nguyen, Tal Waltzer, and Adam R Aron (2025). 'The Impact of a Climate Crisis Class on Collective Action Participation', Environmental Psychology Open.

•  Fabian Dablander, Florian Lange, Cameron Brick, and Adam R Aron (2025). 'Expressing intentions is not climate action', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

•  Mark Huising and Adam R Aron (2023). 'US Universities must tackle their huge carbon footprints'. Nature.

•  Ann Castiglione, Cameron Brick, Stefanie Holden, Ella Miles-Urdan, and Adam R Aron (2022). 'Discovering the psychological building blocks underlying climate action—a longitudinal study of real-world activism', Royal Society Open Science.

Updated April 2026