With our newly joined team member Katharina Koller, the urban and environmental psychology team now includes another APA Award winner. Katharina Koller works as a researcher at the Centre for Social Innovation (ZSI) in Vienna and is now a PhD candidate in the EnvPsy team.
She received the Division 34 Graduate Student Research Award in 2022 for her Master’s Thesis titled “Identifying bias in self-reported pro-environmental behavior”. In the paper, she investigated whether changing the way self-reported pro-environmental behaviour is measured would change the participants’ responses to quantify measurement error.
Another winner of the Graduate Student Research Award, 2023, in the team is Sandra Geiger. Her awarded-winning paper "What we think others think about climate change: Generalizability of pluralistic ignorance across 11 countries" tests whether systematic misperceptions of climate change beliefs (so-called pluralistic ignorance) generalize across 11 countries (N = 3,653), particularly those that are typically underrepresented in psychological research. It further investigates whether presenting country-specific public opinion data on climate change beliefs can promote factors related to climate action.
The 3rd APA Award winner in the team is Prof. Sabine Pahl. 2022 she was awarded with the APA Division 34 Career Achievement Award for her outstanding contributions to the field of Environmental Psychology.