Adam Aron

About

Adam Aron is a professor in the Department of Psychology at UC San Diego. He was a cognitive neuroscientist for 20 years before shifting his research focus to social mobilization efforts aimed at ending fossil fuel use and preparing for climate, ecological, and social stresses. His work emphasizes understanding how to mobilize people into social movements to support policies that address the climate crisis, as well as exploring human emotions such as fear, denial, and disavowal that hinder action. Aron is concerned with the accelerating pace of global heating, the surpassing of planetary boundaries, and the broader polycrisis involving economic inequality, technological shifts, and democratic deficits. His research also investigates how to shift beliefs away from neoliberal values towards collective futures of flourishing. Aron has authored several publications on climate action and social psychology, and he emphasizes the importance of psychological insights in addressing urgent environmental and societal challenges.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Artificial Intelligence
• Cognitive science
• Developmental psychology
• Cognitive psychology
• Chemistry

Selected publications

• Temporal cascade of frontal, motor and muscle processes underlying human action-stopping

  eLife · 2020 · 183 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Action-stopping is a canonical executive function thought to involve top-down control over the motor system. Here we aimed to validate this stopping system using high temporal resolution methods in humans. We show that, following the requirement to stop, there was an increase of right frontal beta (~13 to 30 Hz) at ~120 ms, likely a proxy of right inferior frontal gyrus; then, at 140 ms, there was a broad skeletomotor suppression, likely reflecting the impact of the subthalamic nucleus on basal…

  DOI

• Towards real-world generalizability of a circuit for action-stopping

  Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2021 · 149 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Temporally-precise disruption of prefrontal cortex informed by the timing of beta bursts impairs human action-stopping

  NeuroImage · 2020 · 70 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Human action-stopping is thought to rely on a prefronto-basal ganglia-thalamocortical network, with right inferior frontal cortex (rIFC) posited to play a critical role in the early stage of implementation. Here we sought causal evidence for this idea in experiments involving healthy human participants. We first show that action-stopping is preceded by bursts of electroencephalographic activity in the beta band over prefrontal electrodes, putatively rIFC, and that the timing of these bursts corr…

  DOI

• Climate change engagement of scientists

  Nature Climate Change · 2024-08-05 · 42 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Discovering the psychological building blocks underlying climate action—a longitudinal study of real-world activism

  Royal Society Open Science · 2022-06-01 · 35 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  We are in a climate emergency. Because governments are reacting too slowly, grassroots collective action is key. Understanding the psychological factors underpinning engagement can facilitate the growth of such collective action. Yet, previous research in psychology rarely provided causal evidence for which factors trigger action, lacked focus on the climate crisis, was mostly self-reported behaviour or intentions rather than objective measures, and was mostly cross-sectional rather than longitu…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• How inhibitory control prevents thought intrusions and sensory and motor provocations

  NIH · $4.0M · 2009–2024

• How stopping movement affects working memory

  NIH · $351k · 2013–2016

• Evaluating a Fronto-Basal-Ganglia White-Matter Network for Behavioral Stopping in Lesion Patients

  NSF · $377k · 2009–2012

Frequent coauthors

• Russell A. Poldrack

  Stanford University

  28 shared

• Trevor W. Robbins

  19 shared

• Jan R. Wessel

  University of Iowa

  18 shared

• Ayda Ghahremani

  Krembil Research Institute

  17 shared

• Robert Chen

  IFC Research (United Kingdom)

  14 shared

• Barbara J. Sahakian

  14 shared

• Vignesh Muralidharan

  13 shared

• Nitin Tandon

  Neurological Surgery

  12 shared

Similar researchers at University of California, San Diego

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• David Barnerh-46
• Karen Dobkinsh-40