A deep dive into cognitive scientists and travel

From March 2020 to June 2020, we surveyed cognitive scientists’ (N=489) attitudes toward different conference formats and policy changes. Respondants were recruited from mailing lists such as Cognitive Science Society, AMLaP, Linguist List, and social media (Twitter). Respondants represent all levels of seniority, from undergraduate students to tenured faculty from across the globe.

Through this work we aimed to identify how to move forward in cognitive science in a more carbon neutral way, while also improving equity and accessibility in the field. You may read our letter at its OSF preprint link.

We surveyed the following questions:

• The number of conferences and workshops they attended in 2019
• Distance estimates and travel modalities for each conference attended
• On a scale from 1 to 100, the priority of the following factors influencing whether to attend a conference
  • Distance from home
  • Monetary cost
  • Prestige
  • Relevance to research
  • Networking
  • Location
  • Accessibility
• On a scale from 1 to 100, their support for different sustainability policies
  • 100% virtual conferences
  • Hybrid (e.g. 30/70%) in-person/virtual conferences
  • Satellite meetings
  • Collocating smaller meetings with larger ones
  • Reducing the number of conferences
  • Incentivizing regional conferences
  • Requirement from funding agency, university, or professional society for carbon offsetting
  • Highly central locations to reduce short-range flights
  • Universities instituting emissions limits
  • University policy requiring ground transit (train/bus/car) for short trips
  • University-wide carbon taxes
• Additional attitudes about travel
  • Desired travel for work relative to travel in 2019
  • Desire for more/less travel
  • Belief that the field should work toward sustainability
  • Free response about the survey
• Demographic information
  • Age (18-25, 25-35, 35-45, 45-55, 55+)
  • Location (Africa, Asia, Central America, Europe, North America, South America)
  • Minoritized status
  • Type of region (rural, suburban, urban)

We present here visualizations of how our survey respondants answered each of the questions in the form of several pages where you can see more of our analysis methods and the overall results.

This study was approved by the UW Madison Institutional Review Board. We provide the raw data, excluding free response data to protect respondant privacy, in addition to a lightly processed and anonymized version of participants’ travel data within our data repository.

If you have further questions about the data collection or analysis process, please email cjacobs2@wisc.edu or lrissman@wisc.edu.