Viktoria Cologna

Postdoctoral Researcher

University of Zurich &
ETH Zurich

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I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Zurich (Department of Communication and Media Research) and ETH Zurich (Weather and Climate Risks Group). I am also a Research Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies SOCRATES at the Leibniz University Hannover. 

Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at 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 climate change one of the greatest challenges of our time. 

My reserch in environmental psychology focuses on the determinants of individual and collective action on climate change. Specifically, I have looked at how trust in political institutions, 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 239 researchers at 167 institutions that assesses current levels of trust in scientists and climate change-related attitudes across 67 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.