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From nuclear energy to lab-grown meat, the list of effective but unpopular climate solutions is long.

A new sheds light on why people reject or accept some proposed sustainability technologies: If it doesn’t seem natural, they won’t go for it.��

“We found that naturalness predicts support over and above a lot of other things you might think matter, like risk and benefit perceptions or how much people understand the technology,” said first author Sarah Gonzalez-Coffin, who earned her doctorate in social psychology from 91��ý in May.��

The study also found that a simple shift in framing, comparing technologies to things in nature, can prompt people to trust and accept even engineered solutions, such as nuclear energy, more.��

The findings appear in the journal Communications Earth and Environment.

“We sometimes assume that if we can just develop solutions to address climate change, the public will say, ‘OK. Let’s use them,” said senior author and psychology Professor Leaf Van Boven. “Our study shows that often it is not the technology itself, but the way we communicate about it that shapes public response.”

Sarah Gonzalez-Coffin

Leaf Van Boven

What is natural?

Research in the health and wellness space has long shown that merely framing something as natural prompts consumers to make positive assumptions.��

When fruits are adorned with an “organic” label, people say they taste better even though studies show no major flavor differences. People view vaccines as safer if they are described as made from ingredients “found in nature.”��

�ҴDzԳ��������-��Ǵڴھ���’s has shown that despite its potential environmental benefits, beef grown in a bioreactor is generally considered too unnatural to support.��

While there is no strict legal definition, people tend to view things as natural if they have minimal human intervention, are made from things in the natural environment and are culturally familiar, the authors found.

“We ask ourselves all the time: Is this natural? And we have a deep aversion to things that are artificial,” said Van Boven, noting that this has been shown to hold true across genders and among urban and rural populations. “It’s part of being human.”

To see if it also applies to climate solutions, the researchers surveyed 1,000 U.S. adults about 10 methods for reducing or removing carbon from the atmosphere. They ranged from afforestation (tree planting) to direct-air carbon capture (using chemical filters to draw carbon out of the air and pump it into the ground) to nuclear energy, wind and solar power.

Participants were asked if they would support using tax dollars to deploy the technology on a broad scale.

Above and beyond perceived risks, benefits, fears and familiarity, how “natural” people thought the technology was predicted whether they’d support it. This held true across a diverse sample of the U.S. public and, surprisingly, political parties.

“That is a rare point of convergence, especially in the realm of climate change, where support for solutions can be incredibly polarized,” said Gonzalez-Coffin, now a postdoctoral research associate at University of Arizona’s Lovejoy Center for Bridging Biodiversity, Conservation Science & Policy.��

In a second study, the authors manipulated their descriptions to frame technologies in a natural light. For instance, direct-air carbon capture was described as a technology “that mimics natural processes to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, similar to the way that plants pull carbon from the atmosphere through their leaves.”

This simple wording change led to higher levels of support across the board.

The promise and peril of naturalness

Van Boven notes that humans’ affinity for naturalness can have a dark side.

Tobacco companies leveraged it to sell cigarettes as far back as the early 1900s, billing them as natural, organic or additive-free. Today, companies often to paint everything from single-use coffee pods to bottled water as sustainable, regardless of the true environmental impact.��

An allegiance to naturalness may also lead people to outright dismiss potentially beneficial climate solutions, like nuclear energy, geoengineering or artificial meat, he said.

“If we want to solve climate change, we are going to have to figure out how to accept a broad range of technology solutions,” Van Boven said. “And right now, we are resistant to anything that seems remotely artificial.”

Gonzalez-Coffin stresses that she is not advocating for greenwashing climate solutions.

But she does believe communicators could lean into the genuine, natural elements of technologies. For instance, she notes humpback whale fins helped inspire the design of wind turbine blades.��

She also hopes her research will inform design and investment in sustainability technologies, demonstrating that more natural options might garner easier public buy-in.

“We have incredible engineers and others working on developing technological solutions to climate change; the gridlock that we're running into is largely social,” she said. “Our work brings that missing social component to illuminate the underlying psychology behind this gridlock.”

Other collaborators on the study included: 91��ý Associate Professor Amanda Carrico; Shahzeen Z. Attari (Indiana University Bloomington); Holly Buck (University at Buffalo); Yoel Inbar (University of Toronto Scarborough); Ezra Markowitz (University of Massachusetts Amherst); Kaitlin T. Raimi (University of Michigan); Jonathon P. Schuldt (Cornell University); and Trisha Shrum (University of Vermont).��