Research themes
Climate risk perception and communication
My research examines how people perceive, interpret, and respond to climate risks, and why subjective perceptions often diverge from objective assessments. I am particularly interested in the gap between objectively assessed and perceived risks, including how people estimate hazards such as floods, bushfires, storms, hail, and cyclones in their local areas. This work also explores how climate risks can be communicated more effectively, especially in contexts involving uncertainty. A key focus is understanding the psychological processes underlying risk judgments, including the role of heuristics, affect, personal experience, and trust.
Climate beliefs, trust, and collective action
Another major theme of my research focuses on the psychological and social drivers of climate beliefs, climate action, and policy support. This includes work on trust in scientists and climate scientists, the influence of political ideology and worldviews, and how experiences with extreme weather shape public attitudes and behaviour. I am also interested in the relationship between individual and systemic climate actions, including whether personal pro-environmental behaviours complement or undermine support for broader collective and policy-based solutions.
Rational judgments
A central theme of my research explores whether classic phenomena in judgment and decision-making can be understood through a more rational lens. Much of this work examines how people interpret communicative choices and infer meaning from the behaviour of others during decision-making interactions. For example, my research suggests that phenomena such as framing effects, defaults, and other choice architecture interventions may partly arise because people treat decisions as socially meaningful acts and attempt to infer information, intentions, or recommendations from how options are presented.
Reasoning and logical intuitions
My earlier research focused on reasoning, logical intuition, and the cognitive processes underlying judgment. A major goal of this work was to understand whether intuitive responses in reasoning tasks truly reflect sensitivity to formal logic, or whether they can instead be explained by simpler heuristics processes. In this line of research, I examined how factors such as argument strength, probabilistic structure, belief content, and matching heuristics influence reasoning judgments. Much of this work challenges the idea that people possess a distinct “logical intuition” system, suggesting instead that many intuitive reasoning effects can be explained by non-logical cues.