About

Talbot M. Andrews is an assistant professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University. His research focuses on the intersection of climate change, public opinion, and governance, with a particular emphasis on studying public support for climate change policies. He is also broadly interested in the public's ability to hold elected officials accountable and how public opinion is shaped by disasters. While much of his work is based in the United States, he collaborates with a team studying climate change literacy across Africa. Andrews' research has been published in prominent journals such as The Journal of Politics, Nature Climate Change, Public Opinion Quarterly, and Political Analysis. He has authored the book "Climate Games: Experiments on How People Prevent Disaster" and contributed to the Cambridge Elements series with "Emotions on Our Screens," part of the Politics and Communication series. Prior to his current position at Cornell, he was an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut. He earned his PhD in Political Science from Stony Brook University in August 2020 and completed a postdoctoral research associate position at Princeton University from 2020 to 2021.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Economics
• Ecology
• Psychology
• Natural resource economics
• Geography
• Sociology
• Business
• Computer Science
• Microeconomics
• Public relations
• Environmental science
• Law
• Public economics
• Risk analysis (engineering)
• Finance
• Environmental planning
• Law and economics
• Geology
• Climatology
• Biology
• Oceanography
• Environmental resource management
• Social psychology

Selected publications

• Emotions on Our Screens

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2026-03-27

  book1st authorCorresponding

  While scholars have long considered how political messages make people feel, changes in the media environment have given people unprecedented access to the expressed emotions of others. Through both contemporary news stories and social media, people now learn how others – often strangers – feel about political events. Do people believe in the sincerity of these expressed emotions? To answer this question, we turn to expressions about one of the most pressing issues of our time: climate change. We begin with a theoretic framework of the way people perceive mediated emotional expression. Then, across six pre-registered experiments, we find people are generally skeptical of others' emotional expression – perceiving emotional posts and quotes less authentic and appropriate than more neutral content. While evaluations vary by platform, our results suggest that emotions online aren't always taken at face value – complicating the role of these expressed emotions in political communication.

  PublisherDOI

• Paying Attention and Paying the Costs: Wildfires in the American West

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• La responsabilité du changement climatique en Afrique

  Nature Africa · 2025-07-24

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Paying attention and paying the costs: wildfires in the American West

  Climatic Change · 2025-08-30 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Trend dominance

  Journal of Risk and Uncertainty · 2025-06-01 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Meaning Beyond Numbers: Introducing the Plot Staircase to Measure Graphical Preferences

  Political Analysis · 2025-09-26 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract People regularly get information about the political world in visual form, such as graphs of past economic growth, nonverbal cues from politicians, or projections of future climate change. Visual characteristics affect people’s preferences, but it is difficult to measure the extent of this effect precisely and concisely in surveys. We present a new adaptive design that measures the impact of visual characteristics on people’s preferences: The plot staircase. We apply it to graphs of time series data, identifying the effect of the slope of a sequence on evaluations of the sequence. The plot staircase replicates the existing finding that people have a strong preference for increasing trends. Using fewer survey questions than past approaches, it measures at the individual level how much overall welfare a survey respondent is willing to sacrifice for an increasing trend. We demonstrate the flexibility of the plot staircase across domains (economic growth, jobs creation, and the COVID-19 vaccine rollout) and across sequence characteristics. Survey measurement is more difficult for concepts that cannot be represented textually or numerically; our method enables researchers to measure preferences for graphical properties not reducible to the individual pieces of information.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Low perception of climate change by farmers and herders on Tibetan Plateau

  Global Environmental Change · 2025-02-08 · 9 citations

  articleOpen access

  • Only 26 % of Tibetan farmers perceive significant warming in their region. • Rate of temperature change significantly influences climate change perception. • Income predicts climate awareness among Tibetan farmers and herders. Vulnerable groups living in climate-sensitive areas are facing unprecedented risks. Their perception of the changing climate and its impacts has potentially significant influence over the choices they make in response. However, our understanding of the climate change perceptions of many vulnerable groups, and the key environmental and social predictors of public understanding of climate risk, is insufficient. Our integrated analysis of physical climate trends, demographic characteristics, and climate change responses of over 24,000 farmers and herders across the Tibetan Plateau, finds that fewer than 26 % of respondents perceive the significant warming trend in their region. The results suggest perceptions of climate change are more sensitive to rates of temperature change, changes around ice melt, and extremes, than increases in average temperatures. Importantly, broader dimensions of well-being have influence over perception and confidence in adaptation options as average annual income, having a credit loan, consuming trusted media, and living on high-altitude locations have a significant positive effect on perceiving climate change. Identifying synergies between dimensions of human well-being and adaptation to climate change is critical for investment in the scalable transformations needed to achieve more sustainable livelihoods. Improving income, access to credit and social services present policy makers opportunities for targeted interventions to increase climate change perception of farmers and herders. These interventions can reduce inequalities in adaptation capacity and strengthen the public’s ability to adapt to the impacts of climate change with co-benefits with broader progress towards poverty reduction, social services, climate information and education.

  PublisherDOI

• Climate change blame in Africa

  Nature Africa · 2025-07-24

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Most Africans place primary responsibility for climate action on their own government

  Communications Earth & Environment · 2025-04-04 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Global increase in the pace of climate action is urgent. Yet, it is less clear who citizens expect to take the lead on climate action across different regions of the world: historical emitters, their own governments, or themselves? Our analysis of Africa’s largest public opinion survey, the Afrobarometer, across 39 countries finds that Africans place primary responsibility for addressing climate change on their own government, a further third see ordinary citizens as most responsible, while very few place responsibility on historical emitters. Multinomial logistic regression analysis shows that education, decreased poverty, and access to new media sources are associated with increased attribution of responsibility to historical emitters. Our results suggest that poverty alleviation and increased access to education, combined with professional frontline government bureaucracies can re-apportion citizen expectations of responsibility for climate action onto historical emitters and actors with more resources for scalable climate action. About 45 percent of Africans believe their government is responsible for climate change action, and the least responsibility is attributed to countries and businesses with high greenhouse gas emissions, according to public survey data and statistical analysis.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The winds of change? Attitudes toward wind projects and their electoral implications in Texas

  Energy Policy · 2025-03-20 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
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Frequent coauthors

• Ioannis D. Evrigenis

  81 shared

• Ted Enamorado

  Washington University in St. Louis

  81 shared

• David Fortunato

  University of California, San Diego

  81 shared

• Peter Bils

  Vanderbilt University

  81 shared

• Leslie K. Finger

  University of North Texas

  81 shared

• T.H. Curtis

  University of North Texas

  81 shared

• Andrew W. Delton

  Stony Brook University

  8 shared

• Reuben Kline

  8 shared

Labs

• Talbot AndrewsPI

Education

• PhD Student, Political Science

  Stony Brook University

• B.A., Political Science/Psychology

  University of Portland

  2016