Media and Public Perception

Women are losing their voices on this platform and the data is right in front of us... There has been a clear shift on LinkedIn in the last twelve months and I have watched my reach fall from millions of views per post to a few thousand. I thought it was just me. Then I started talking to other women and realised it is happening everywhere. Women who lead teams. Women who run companies. Women who speak with honesty and softness and emotional depth. It is the same pattern - their content is being pushed down. Posts written with emotional depth, vulnerability, or soft honesty are receiving far less reach than before. Yet when men speak about the same topics, in the same emotional tone, the algorithm seems to reward it. This is not because women are writing less powerful content. It is because the algorithm is rewarding what it interprets as authority language, often coded as male. Posts that use agentic words, direct statements and a more assertive tone are being pushed out more widely. Empathy based content is being limited. The data is visible on thousands of accounts. The irony is that men like Jake Humphrey Steven Bartlett and Daniel Priestley talk about these things often, but their delivery is still framed as leadership, advice and direction. When women speak from the same emotional space, the algorithm reads it as personal reflection and deprioritises it. When women communicate with nuance, reflection or emotional truth, the reach drops. This is bias in design. Even in 2025. I refuse to believe that women’s perspectives are less valuable. I refuse to believe that softness is less important than strength. I refuse to believe that emotion belongs only to men with podcasts. So I am running some experiments over the next few weeks. Different styles of writing. Different types of images. Even a different version of myself generated through AI to see how the platform responds. Because if a male version of me receives more reach than the real me, then we have a bigger problem than an algorithm update. If you are a woman who has noticed the same thing, I would love you to share this post. The more voices we bring together, the harder this becomes to ignore. Visibility should not depend on gendered language patterns - it should depend on the value behind the message. Our voices matter. They always have. And they will continue to, even if the system needs reminding. Yes, your number of followers have a significant impact, but when my impressions drop from 7 million to 900 consistently, something is clearly off. Megan Cornish, LICSW Katie Langdon Women in Pharma (WiP), 💥 Amy Kean 💥 Chantal Cox Katrina McGuire CertRP Deirdre O'Neill Cindy Gallop Jane Evans Be keen to know your thoughts in the comments… 👇

Many discussions about democracy focus on misinformation. But another challenge may be equally important: distorted perceptions of social reality. Social media often functions like a funhouse mirror, amplifying the most extreme voices who dominate online discourse. As a result, people come to falsely believe those voices represent society and public opinion far more than they actually do. People often describe social media as a town hall or a technology that fosters democratic participation. But our data suggests the opposite pattern in terms of how people actually use it. For instance, authoritarian tendencies are about 3X as likely to predict whether people share their political opinion on social media (compared to pro-democratic values). I presented this research today at a special panel on threats to democracy at the Association for Psychological Science conference in Barcelona. I am convinced that these perception distortions is crucial for understanding democratic discourse in the age of AI and social media. You can read our paper on the funhouse mirror here: https://lnkd.in/e_aCGbg4

Almost half of Americans (45%) now expect to see catastrophic climate impacts within their own lifetimes according to a new YouGov survey. That’s no longer a scientific forecast; it’s a mainstream reality check. What’s even more telling is that the "Climate Perception Gap" is closing in the places we’d least expect. The latest AEF survey shows that in states like Texas, Florida, Ohio, and Indiana, the push for solutions is decoupling from political identity. In fact, 83% of voters in these key states, including 75% of Trump supporters, now view solar as a strategic necessity for U.S. energy dominance. This represents a fundamental shift in the sustainability landscape: 🏠 Survivalism is the new Sustainability. People aren't just worried about melting ice caps; they are worried about their own homes and local economies. Climate change has become personal, local, and immediate. ⚡ The "Solution Consensus." Even among those who might disagree on the cause of climate change, there is an overwhelming consensus on the cure. Clean energy is now being framed as national security, economic competition with China, and a way to lower utility bills. 💸 Perception Drives Pressure. When 45% of the public expects a disaster, "business-as-usual" isn't just a slow strategy, it’s a fiduciary risk. Leaders who ignore this are effectively devaluing their own assets and ignoring a massive, cross-partisan mandate for resilience. The Bottom Line: The gap between what the public fears and what leadership delivers has never been wider. Whether you're driven by environmental concern or economic dominance, the destination is the same: a cleaner, more resilient energy grid. Link to the research in the comments ⬇️ #Sustainability #CleanEnergy #RiskManagement #EnergyTransition #ClimateAction #2026Trends #EnergyDominance

For years, climate action has been presented as the story of sacrifice: less comfort, less choice, higher costs, more rules, a smaller life justified by a safer planet. That story was never capable of carrying a movement. More importantly, it's not an honest description of the world as it is. Because for the vast majority of us, business as usual is now the real sacrifice. Families are already sacrificing income to food and energy volatility; citizens are sacrificing health to polluted air and extreme heat; communities are sacrificing resilience as the soils, rivers, forests, and coastlines that they depend on are degraded; and countries are sacrificing freedom and strategic autonomy to dependence on imported fuels. Fossil fuels have tied us to volatile global markets and unstable suppliers for decades. Europe was reminded how costly that exposure could be after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: between 2021 - 2024 fossil fuel imports cost roughly €930 billion more than they would have before energy prices spiked. These costs, borne by households and businesses, do not build stronger communities, cleaner industry, or greater resilience. They do not train workers, modernise grids, or lower bills for the future. They buy, at best, the same vulnerability at a higher price. Food tells the same story. In the five years to May 2026, BLS-tracked average retail prices for ground roast coffee rose by about 108%, while regular ground beef rose by about 64% as drought and extreme heat have damaged coffee harvests, shrunk cattle herds, raised feed pressures, and tightened beef supplies. Climate and ecological breakdown are no longer distant risks, but pressures people already recognise in their homes, workplaces, communities and weekly budgets. But, because those pressures are rarely connected to their causes, climate action is often heard as yet another sacrifice imposed on people who are already stretched. The task of leadership is to make the connection clear: the transition, done well, is not an added burden. It is how we stop these costs and insecurities from spiralling year after year. When climate action is explained in those terms, it cuts through. Recent research commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Potential Energy Coalition, based on more than 83,000 adults across the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany, and Italy, found that messages focused on less pollution, better health, affordability, energy security, and protecting future generations increased support for action by more than 10 percentage points. Interestingly, “net zero” was the least popular term tested. So, let’s speak in terms that people recognise: less sacrifice, more freedom; less dependence, more security; less delay, more leadership. Not a retreat from the modern economy, but a route to a cheaper, safer, and more secure one. Start there, and the transition stops looking like sacrifice, and starts looking like common sense.

London Climate Action Week ran 1,300 events this year, double last year's. The word that came up least was climate itself. Speakers dropped it on purpose. What replaced it was heat, flooding, bills and dirty air, things people actually feel. Eileen Higgins, Mayor of Miami, put it most bluntly: where she works it is almost illegal to say climate. So she stopped. She talks about flooding and homes people can no longer insure; in Florida, insurance often costs more than the mortgage. She points to the flood bond, palms swapped for trees that hold back water, and resilience hubs for low-income areas. Yes, it is adaptation and resilience. But actually it is all about improving people's lives. She never calls it climate. London told the same story through mitigation. In 2013, nine-year-old Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah died from an asthma attack a landmark inquest ruled was caused by air pollution. Sadiq Khan apologised formally on the city's behalf, then expanded the Ultra Low Emission Zone with tougher rules. NO2 down 41%, PM2.5 down 28%, toxic-air deaths down around 40%. That is mitigation: fewer polluting vehicles, more electric ones, in language a parent understands. Kate Gallego, Mayor of Phoenix, is doing the same with heat. She appointed a Chief Heat Officer, paints tarmac with reflective coatings, plants shade, and is wrestling with the AI boom's data centres, which throw off heat and strain power and water. Her answer: co-locate some next to factories that can use the waste heat, cutting the energy they would otherwise burn on heating. Again, the language is money and health. My first reaction was scepticism: this felt like spin, or greenwashing dressed up as common sense. But listen to what replaced the word: flooding, bills, insurance, clean air, a child's asthma. That is not evasion. It is what people feel, and it makes the case more pragmatic and inclusive, stripping the politics out of a word that had turned polarising and weaponised. Emma Pinchbeck FEI, who runs the UK Climate Change Committee, put numbers on it that week. The UK was built for a climate that no longer exists: around 2 degrees by 2050, up to 4 by century's end. The adaptation bill is roughly £11 billion a year, expected to return tens of billions. The cost of waiting compounds every year. The risks land hardest as heat for the young, the ill and outdoor workers, as food insecurity, and as flooding reaching roads, homes and railways. Investors and operators should sit with that. Higgins sells lower insurance and homes that do not flood. Khan sells clean air for children who cannot vote for him. Gallego sells cooler homes and lower bills. What people line up to buy is a cheaper, safer, healthier life, savings built in. For anyone building or backing companies here, the lesson is simple. Sell the lower bill, the safer home and the cleaner air. That is mitigation and adaptation both, spoken in language people can feel.

I speak with a lot of people about gender equality. Sometimes people ask if “things are better for …. women who’ve made it to the top, the next-generation women who grew up thinking they could be anything, women with elite credentials, etc." Unfortunately, research mostly shows that the answer is “no”--gender inequality is at play at every level of organizational life, from early career to the C-suite. For example, I listened to a very interesting webinar hosted by Russell Reynolds Associates about their research study: Time to Tell a Different Story. They used media as a proxy for public sentiments about CEOs and tracked 20,000 news articles, covering almost 750 CEOs across FTSE 100, S&P 500, and Euronext 100 companies. What they discovered is that, even at the CEO level, patterns of language describing and telling the story of women differs from those for men. Here is one pattern from their study: The media tend to use very different adjectives to describe women CEOs versus their male equivalents. Based on the proportion of mentions across media, men were twice as likely to be described as ‘innovators,’ whereas women were 72% more likely to be described as ‘inspirational.’   Research at the Stanford VMware Women's Leadership Innovation Lab also showed gendered, and often disadvantaging, language patterns in performance reviews. (https://lnkd.in/gG2zy8vX) So, it’s not just the media. These patterns reflect societal norms and can lead to disparate outcomes for strong performing women. What can you do? First, you can catch gendered language patterns. Here are a few: 1️⃣ Using more people-oriented skills for women and more task-oriented for men (see RRA research) 2️⃣ Using more doubt-casting language, such as “seems to” or “managed to”. For example, instead of saying “They produced outstanding results” using “They seemed to produce outstanding results. (Do a doubt-check. See this post I wrote: https://lnkd.in/g_655tc2) 3️⃣ Using or not using stand-out language. Notice if your industry or role has some terms that indicate stand-out impact. Then notice if you only use those words to describe certain kinds of people. 💡 🌟 Once you catch these patterns, then you can find ways to remove doubt, equally use task-oriented and people-oriented descriptors and try stand-out language for all top performers. While language often reflects societal norms and stereotypes, a strategic use of language can help set the conditions for folks to succeed. https://lnkd.in/gEJJRsXS #words #language #performancemanagement #media

Every founder who demands Economic Times, Mint, or Business Standard from their PR agency should read this. Editorial desks at national dailies operate on a simple filter: does this company's story help my reader in any way? A startup with no market validation, no user numbers worth citing, and a founder the editor has never heard of does not pass that filter. It has nothing to do with how good your product is. The threshold for Tier-1 coverage is built on three things: – Data that proves something new. – A founder or spokesperson with a track record of saying something worth quoting. – Timing that aligns with what the newsroom is already tracking. If you don't have it yet, it does not mean you can't get Tier-1 media forever. It means that you need to follow a roadmap. - build your coverage in trade publications first. - get quoted in sector-specific outlets. - create a data asset — a report, a survey, an index — that gives a mainstream journalist a reason to call you. The path to ET's pages runs through the boring, patient work of becoming a credible source before you pitch the big story. P.S. If your PR agency promised you Mint in month one, that tells you more about the agency than about Mint.

What is lost when environmental coverage is cut Word that The Washington Post would be cutting roughly 1/3 of its staff spread quickly this week. Among those affected were at least a dozen reporters, editors, and visual journalists covering climate and the environment. The cuts will materially reduce the Post’s climate coverage. They come just over three years after the paper significantly expanded that desk, nearly tripling its size and describing climate change as “perhaps the century’s biggest story.” At the time, then–executive editor Sally Buzbee framed the investment as recognition that climate touches nearly every domain the newsroom covers. The layoffs were first reported by The New York Times as part of a broader retrenchment that will see more than 300 journalists lose their jobs. After the cuts, the Post’s climate desk is expected to retain only a handful of reporters. This is not simply a story about one newsroom. It reflects a wider weakening of the institutions responsible for producing and maintaining a shared factual record, particularly on subjects that are politically contested and structurally complex. Under ordinary conditions, information performs an underappreciated coordinating function. It allows people to orient themselves, understand what is happening, and trace responsibility across systems that are otherwise hard to see. When it works, it tends to fade into the background. Its absence becomes evident only when facts arrive late, circulate unevenly, or fail to circulate at all. Environmental issues are especially vulnerable to this erosion. Decisions shaping forests, fisheries, land use, and emissions are often made far from where their effects are felt, spread across ministries, companies, financiers, regulators, and supply chains. Without sustained reporting that documents how those decisions connect, accountability blurs. Harm can persist even where concern exists because the full picture is difficult to assemble. Journalism, at its most basic level, is an attempt to make those connections clear. It places verifiable information into the public record and leaves others—officials, courts, markets, communities—to decide what follows. It functions as civic maintenance, keeping the factual record from fragmenting entirely. The scaling back of climate reporting is not just a loss of stories. It represents a thinning of the informational infrastructure that allows societies to recognize problems early enough to respond. The loss of a climate desk does not end climate journalism. But it narrows the space in which sustained, accountable reporting can occur. At a moment when environmental risk is compounding and political pressure on climate coverage is intensifying, that narrowing should give pause. Some of what matters most is not what commands attention, but what makes attention possible in the first place. 🌱 Full piece: https://mongabay.cc/Bo6zmf 🌱 Related piece: https://mongabay.cc/EDt4II

What if one of the biggest barriers to solving global challenges isn't a lack of public willingness to act, but a widespread misunderstanding of what other people are willing to do? New research published in Science Magazine suggests exactly that. Not just a survey: We embedded an incentivised behavioral experiment into the Gallup World Poll, reaching 101,123 people across 125 nationally representative country samples, using probability based samples, representing 92% of the world's adult population. Participants were not simply asked what they believed. They were asked to make a decision with potential real financial consequences. This is the first time an incentivised behavioral experiments has ever been undertaken at this scale before. Much of what we know about human cooperation comes from self-reports, convenience samples, or laboratory settings. This study measured behavior at a truly global scale. The headline finding is striking. Across countries, cultures, and political systems, 69% of people chose to cooperate with a stranger to support action on climate change, accepting a personal cost in pursuit of a collective benefit. Yet respondents believed that only 47% of others would do the same. This pessimistic misperception existed in 124 of the 125 countries studied. In short, we are more cooperative than we think. The implications extend well beyond climate change: - The research found that beliefs about others' behavior are among the strongest predictors of whether people choose to cooperate themselves. - It also demonstrated that a simple information intervention, informing people that others are concerned about climate change, increased cooperation by shifting those beliefs. This suggests that correcting misperceptions, not just changing incentives or policies, can be a lever for collective action. For policymakers, institutions, and leaders tackling complex societal challenges, this raises an important question: "How much collective action is being left on the table because people underestimate the willingness of others to contribute?" Publication in Science is significant not only because of the journal's prestige, but because it gives these findings the visibility to inform policy, research, and public discourse around the world. The study's message is both simple and encouraging: We are a more cooperative species than we think. And understanding that may be one of the keys to unlocking greater collective action in the years ahead. Hugely proud of the whole Gallup team who played a central role in making this research possible, including Zacchary Ritter and Rajesh srinivasan, alongside our academic partners Peter Andre, Teodora Boneva, Felix Chopra and Armin Falk at The University of Bonn 📄 Full article: https://lnkd.in/dq28jDQd #Science #BehavioralEconomics #GallupWorldPoll #HumanCooperation #ClimateAction #CollectiveAction #GlobalResearch

Caring about climate is not enough. It never was. A major review just published in Nature Climate Change, by Kelly Fielding and Matthew Hornsey, makes this case with unusual clarity. Across 125 countries, strong majorities express willingness to act on climate. Yet actual behavior remains stubbornly low. The gap between intention and action is not a communication failure. It is a systems failure. The review proposes a tripartite framework of mechanisms that explain why climate-friendly intentions so rarely translate into behavior: intrapersonal, social, and structural. Intrapersonal mechanisms include cognitive biases, emotion-based drivers, and behavioral habits. Our brains are wired for immediacy, not for diffuse, long-term threats. We discount future costs. We underestimate how much regret we will feel for inaction. We overestimate how inconvenient change will be. Social mechanisms involve norms, identity, and visibility. We look to others to calibrate what is normal, what is acceptable, what is worth doing. When climate action is invisible or socially risky, intentions collapse. And then there are structural mechanisms, the ones that politics consistently ignores. Cost. Convenience. Institutional trust. These are not soft variables. They are the architecture within which all individual motivation either succeeds or fails. You can have the strongest climate intention in the world and still be blocked by infrastructure that makes the sustainable option slower, more expensive, and less reliable. This is where the review gets politically uncomfortable. Self-reported intentions explained only 5% of the variance in actual pro-environmental behavior. Five percent. The remaining 95% is shaped by the systems people inhabit, not the values they hold. From an Eco-Affective Health perspective, this matters enormously. We have spent decades trying to change minds. The evidence says we also need to change cities, supply chains, financial systems, and governance structures. Affect, motivation, and identity are real forces, but they operate inside structural containers that either enable or constrain them. Closing the intention-behavior gap is not a psychology project. It is a political project that needs psychology. The intervention toolbox is there. Implementation intentions, peer modelling, block leaders, default green options, financial incentives, participatory governance. Effect sizes are documented. The knowledge exists. What is missing is the political will to deploy it at scale. Article link: https://lnkd.in/dhemQvSc Follow our work at ewahlab.com #EWAHLab #EcoAffectiveHealth #ClimateAction #BehaviorChange #ClimatePolitics #PlanetaryHealth #ClimateMentalHealth #EnvironmentalPsychology #GlobalMentalHealth #SystemsChange