In a world heading into a climate crisis, negative information about renewable energy projects and disinformation about climate science and actions are major barriers to the public’s support of climate change mitigation actions. This thesis aimed to first understand what drives information processing, to then show the short and long-term dominance of negative information and disinformation on people’s perception of climate change mitigation actions. The final aim was to test psychological inoculation strategies attuned to the different psychological drivers of information processing that can fight negative information and disinformation.

Spampatti et al. (2022) describes how negative information disproportionately affects multiple facets of perception of a climate change mitigation action, geothermal energy systems, in the short and long-term. Spampatti et al. (2024) introduces a newly created psychological inoculation, the trust inoculation, which makes the trust in the energy stakeholder salient to protect people from incoming negative information. In Spampatti et al. (2023a) I apply the trust inoculation in a preregistered, longitudinal field study in Geneva, to protect public support for geothermal energy systems against a negative event. Spampatti et al. (2023b) presents a Registered Report where, across 12 countries (N = 6,816), six inoculation strategies—scientific consensus, trust in scientists, transparent communication, moralization of climate action, accuracy and positive emotions—were largely ineffective in combating real-world disinformation about climate science and mitigation actions.

I conclude by discussing the merits and shortcomings of this new informational strategies and propose future directions for the research on climate disinformation interventions.