Rachit Dubey, a UCLA communications professor, has been honored with the NOMIS & Science Young Explorer Award for his extensive research on the cognitive reasons behind climate apathy and ways to break through that indifference. As part of the award, the journal Science published his essay, "The normalization of (almost) everything," alongside an interview.
Dubey’s scholarship focuses on how our minds perceive long-term threats and how the very mechanisms that enable us to be flexible and resilient can prevent us from reacting to crises such as climate change. His award-winning essay analyzes this subject in-depth, warning of the hidden danger within our ability to adapt to nearly any circumstance.
Through large-scale behavioral studies, Dubey and his team discovered that people tend to react with more urgency to binary data about sudden shifts than to continuous data that presents more gradual changes. Coining this phenomenon the “boiling frog” effect, Dubey concluded that climate change often fails to sustain public attention because it unfolds slowly and is poorly understood. By visualizing the abstract elements of the climate crisis in more tangible terms, these findings have helped communicators and policy groups change attitudes and build toward a sustainable future.
Dubey, who earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Princeton University, launched the Computational Cognitive Policy Lab at UCLA in July 2025. There, he works to combine behavior experiments, formal models and an interdisciplinary approach to neuroscience, psychology, computer science and public policy to better understand how humans adapt to change. He has also contributed to numerous publications.
The NOMIS & Science Young Explorer Award, granted by the editors of Science and the NOMIS Foundation, recognizes pioneering researchers who ask questions at the intersection of natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities. Recipients must demonstrate an innovative approach to relevant topics and a commitment to making a positive impact on the world through their work.
