Viktoria Cologna

Postdoctoral Researcher

Collegium Helveticum
Swiss Institute for Advanced Study

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I am an Early-Career Fellow at the Collegium Helveticum, the Swiss Institute for Advanced Study.

Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Zurich, ETH Zurich, and Harvard University, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. I completed my doctorate at ETH Zurich with a dissertation in environmental psychology. 

I am interested in how behavioral responses can help mitigate and adapt to climate change one of the greatest challenges of our time. 

My research in environmental psychology focuses on the determinants of individual and collective action on climate change. Specifically, I have looked at how trust in climate scientists, knowledge, and technology-related attitudes influence action on climate change. I am particularly interested in the role that experts, such as climate scientists, play in influencing climate-friendly behaviors as well as how scientists' own behavior (e.g., engagement in advocacy) influences their credibility. 

I am currently leading the TISP Many Labs study. TISP is a consortium of 241 researchers at 179 institutions that assesses current levels of trust in scientists and climate change-related attitudes across 68 countries on all inhabited continents.

More specifically, I use quantitative methods to answer the following questions:

I believe that answering these questions requires interdisciplinary collaborations, which is why I am currently collaborating with historians and philosophers of science, computational social scientists, science communication scholars, and climate scientists.