About

Dr. Joe Árvai is the Dana and David Dornsife Professor of Psychology and the Director of the Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Southern California's Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences. His research focuses on improving critical thinking, judgment, and decision-making capabilities, particularly in contexts involving risk and uncertainty, where individuals confront tradeoffs across social, economic, and environmental objectives. He investigates how instinctive judgment and decision-making are biased by unchecked emotions and motivated reasoning, with a primary emphasis on environmental issues and sustainability. His work involves conducting applied research with a lab of post-doctoral scholars and graduate students to better understand how people make judgments and decisions about environmental risks and sustainability. This research aims to develop tools and approaches that enhance decision quality by aligning individuals' values and objectives with their judgments and choices. Dr. Árvai's research spans a broad spectrum of contexts, including environmental risk management, consumer choice, and policy-making. He is also a frequent advisor to government, business, and NGOs, having served on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Chartered Science Advisory Board and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences’ Board on Environmental Change and Society. Additionally, he is a Senior Researcher at the Decision Science Research Institute and an Adjunct Professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Business
• Social psychology
• Waste management
• Chemistry
• Applied psychology
• Agricultural science
• Agricultural economics
• Environmental science
• Economics
• Engineering
• Geography
• Archaeology
• Pulp and paper industry
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Fear, anger, and COVID-19 risk: a longitudinal US study

  Journal of Risk Research · 2025-04-03 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Mapping risks of water injustice and perceptions of privatized drinking water in the United States: A mixed methods approach

  Risk Analysis · 2025-04-15 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  About 2 million people in the United States do not have access to running water or indoor plumbing in their homes. In addition, 30 million more Americans live where water systems operate unsafely. More still could have access to clean and safe drinking water but cannot afford to pay for it. Water privatization has been proposed as both a solution to and an exacerbator of these challenges, but its potential consequences have not been investigated on a national scale. Data from the US Environmental Protection Agency's Safe Drinking Water Information System and the US Center for Disease Control's Environmental Justice Index were used to assess the spatial distribution of water injustice hotspots, water system violations, and water system ownership. These data were merged with a nationally representative survey of US residents that measured how people perceive their water across different water injustice indicators. Results indicated that water system violations were not randomly distributed across the United States and risks of exposure to water injustice appeared to cluster in certain locations as hotspots. Clusters of water system violations were spatially associated with private water system ownership. Hotspots of water injustice were more often surrounded by counties with low proportions of privately owned water systems than counties with high proportions. Results also suggested that individuals living in areas with higher water injustice perceived their water as lower quality and less reliable. Water system ownership moderated this relationship. Recommendations for policymakers are discussed, including how to build collaborative decision-making processes that account for both objective and subjective measures of water injustice.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Partisan winds: Group-level polarization and issue-framing propel attitudes about local wind farms

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This is the accepted manuscript (authors’ version) of the article published in the journal Energy Research & Social Science (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2024.103848). It is deposited here in compliance with funder and institutional open access mandates.

  PublisherDOI

• Partisan winds: Group-level polarization and issue-framing propel attitudes about local wind farms

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This is the accepted manuscript (authors’ version) of the article published in the journal Energy Research & Social Science (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2024.103848). It is deposited here in compliance with funder and institutional open access mandates.

  PublisherDOI

• Issue Information ‐ TOC

  Risk Analysis · 2024-04-23

  paratextOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• All atwitter about climate change: do civil and informative Twitter debates influence support for climate policy?

  Journal of Risk Research · 2024-02-21 · 2 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Partisan winds: Group-level polarization and issue-framing propel attitudes about local wind farms

  Energy Research & Social Science · 2024-11-21 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Political polarization is an obstacle to public support and effective communication for renewable energy projects. Depolarizing messages can be helpful, but it is difficult to determine where to concentrate efforts until social scientists first disentangle the effects of unconscious issue-based and conscious group norm-based polarization processes. This study investigates the extent to which attitudes towards wind energy development are polarized in the United States, focusing on attitudes about local wind farms. We tested different frames in a survey with 1300 U.S. participants, combining implicit and explicit attitude measures to measure unconscious and conscious attitudes towards nearby wind farms, respectively. Our findings suggest that explicit attitudes towards wind farms are more polarized than implicit attitudes, emphasizing the role of conscious processes in shaping attitudes. Furthermore, perceptions of within-party support significantly influence explicit attitudes, indicating the importance of group norm-based polarization in this context. While our framing interventions aimed at addressing issue-based polarization yielded mixed results, the moderating effect of perceived within-party support underscores the potential efficacy of interventions targeting group-level processes. Regarding policy implications, our findings highlight the importance of considering both issue-based and group norm-based polarization when developing and implementing communication strategies for garnering local support for nearby renewable energy developments. • Conscious attitudes about local wind farms are more polarized than unconscious ones. • The partisan gap is attributed to individual and group-level polarization processes. • Individual polarization relates to ideology and group polarization to identity. • Issue-framing appealing to ideology has limited efficacy in combating polarization. • Group-level polarization is key and depends on perceptions of within-party support.

  PublisherDOI

• Don't say “vegan” or “plant-based”: Food without meat and dairy is more likely to be chosen when labeled as “healthy” and “sustainable”

  Journal of Environmental Psychology · 2023-12-11 · 30 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Public Concern about Water Safety, Weather, and Climate: Insights from the World Risk Poll

  Environmental Science & Technology · 2023-01-25 · 19 citations

  articleSenior author

  Water safety refers to the quality of one's drinking water and whether it lacks dangerous contaminants. Limited access to safe water is projected to impact approximately 5 billion people worldwide by 2050. Climate change and worsening severe weather events pose increasing threats to global water safety. However, people may not perceive links between climate change and water safety, potentially undermining their willingness to implement behaviors that improve water safety. Existing studies on water safety risk perceptions have mostly been conducted in single-country contexts, which limits researchers' ability to make cross-national comparisons. Here, we assessed the extent to which people's severe weather concern and climate change concern predict their water safety concern. Our analyses used survey data from the 142-country 2019 Lloyd's Register Foundation World Risk Poll, including 21 low-income and 34 lower-middle-income countries. In mixed-effects models, severe weather concern was significantly more predictive of water safety concern than was climate change concern, although both resulted in positive associations. Worldwide, this finding was robust, insensitive to key model specifications and countries' varying protection against unsafe drinking water. We suggest communicators and policymakers improve messaging about water safety and other environmental threats by explaining how they are impacted by worsening severe weather.

  PublisherDOI

• I think, therefore I act, <i>Revisited</i>: Building a stronger foundation for risk analysis

  Risk Analysis · 2023-06-18 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Actively open-minded thinking (AOT) is a thinking style in which people engaged in judgment and decision-making actively seek out and then evaluate information in a manner that is intentionally disconnected from their prior beliefs and motivations and in line with self-perceptions of autonomy. Actively open-minded thinkers have been observed to make both more accurate judgments about the magnitude of risks and more evidence-based decisions under uncertainty in a wide range of situations such as climate change and politics. In addition, actively open-minded thinkers functioning in domains where they lack a desired level of knowledge are open to "outsourcing" the job of critical reasoning thinking to credible experts; in other words, they are better able to gauge who is trustworthy and then rely on the insights of these trustworthy others to help them reach a conclusion. We report results from a follow-up to research previously published in Risk Analysis that confirms these tenets in the context of COVID-19. We then extend these results to offer a series of recommendations for strengthening the process and outcomes of risk analysis: leveraging the latent norm of autonomy and personal agency that underpins AOT, activating or engaging with approaches to reasoning-such as decision structuring-that are in line with AOT, and working upstream and downstream of risk analysis to establish AOT as a norm of its own.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Resource management in developing countries: Improving decisions by uncovering hidden objectives and confronting difficult tradeoffs

  NSF · $395k · 2009–2012

• DRRC/Collaborative Research: Emergency Management in Rural America: Decision-Makers Use of Climate Science in Flood Planning and Management

  NSF · $102k · 2011–2015

Frequent coauthors

• Douglas L. Bessette

  22 shared

• Robin Gregory

  University of British Columbia

  19 shared

• Robyn S. Wilson

  19 shared

• Caitlin Drummond

  Arizona State University

  19 shared

• Lauren Lutzke

  Penn Center for AIDS Research

  14 shared

• Michael Siegrist

  ETH Zurich

  14 shared

• Alex Segrè Cohen

  14 shared

• Victoria Campbell-Árvai

  11 shared

Awards & honors

• Fellow (or Equivalent) of National Society in Discipline, So…