What Drives Inaction on Climate Change? A Review of the Literature

Despite widespread concern about climate change, behavioral engagement and policy support remain limited. We present and reinterpret existing evidence through a collectiveaction framework informed by belief-dependent preferences. Two belief channels—firstorder beliefs about others’ behavior (descriptive norms) and second-order beliefs about others’ expectations (social expectations)—are embedded in a behavioral public-goods model. When beliefs are accurate, these channels sustain conditional cooperation and selffulfilling collective action. Inaction may instead arise when the belief references are biased downward. We distinguish between two empirically grounded sources of distortion: genuine misperceptions, arising from informational limits and bounded rationality, and motivated misperceptions, driven by self-serving and identity-protective reasoning. This distinction guides policy: visibility and feedback correct genuine errors; identity-compatible framing, in-group messages, and narrative persuasion counter motivated bias. We thus connect the behavioral theory of conditional cooperation with empirical evidence on belief distortions and map the different mechanisms to interventions that overcome collective climate inaction.