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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Environmental Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1472852
This article is part of the Research TopicClimate Change Challenge: Adaptation to Climate ChangeView all 18 articles
Outdoor thermal comfort and cognition impact pro-environmental behaviours: Evidence from a field experiment in the tropics
Provisionally accepted- Singapore ETH Centre, ETH Zürich, Singapore, Singapore
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Climate change and Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect pose a serious threat, particularly for tropical countries like Singapore that present high air temperatures and humidity levels and are heating up twice as fast as the rest of the world. Policy interventions have focused on promoting individuals' engagement in pro-environmental behaviours to mitigate urban heat and CO2 emissions. Even though past research evidence people's long-lasting environmental attitudes and awareness, these proved to not always derive into actions. We investigate the attitudes-behaviour gap and the awareness-behaviour gap from a cognitive perspective and to what extent cognition is affected by urban heat.Through a quasi-experimental design in the field with 309 older adults and a novel framework, we provided evidence that low thermal comfort affects cognitive control, which at the same time is proved to be a significant moderator between proenvironmental attitudes and awareness and pro-environmental behaviours. We also observed that the higher the individuals' cognitive control capacity, the greater its role as a moderator to close the attitudes-behaviour gap and the awareness-behaviour gap and induce more pro-environmental behaviour. Policies aimed at preserving thermal comfort and enhancing heat adaptation, not only benefit the health and wellbeing of senior citizens but also promote their pro-environmental behaviours. This might offer a central lever for behavioural change initiatives.
Keywords: cognitive control capacity, pro-environmental behaviours, Heat and climate change, Outdoor thermal comfort (OTC), attitudes-behaviour gap
Received: 30 Jul 2024; Accepted: 07 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Borzino. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Natalia Borzino, Singapore ETH Centre, ETH Zürich, Singapore, Singapore
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