“People believe all kinds of things about how the world will end,” said social psychologist Matthew Billet of the University of California, Irvine, US, in conversation with Science Unscripted hosts, Connor Dillon and Gabriel Borrud.
“Some people mean human extinction,” Billett said. “Some people mean the collapse of civilization or some kind of transformation of civilization as we know it, sometimes leading to utopia, or a revival of humanity. And some people mean the complete destruction of the Earth [by] Comet or solar flare or something.”
Most of us might have had similar thoughts about the end of the world. But Billet and his colleagues wanted to find out how these beliefs affect people’s attitudes.
The researchers found that people’s attitudes toward global risks depend on four factors:
- How soon do you think the world is going to end?
- How do you think it will end?
- What is your personal role in this end?
- What do you think will happen after the end?
“For example, if you think the end of the world is in God’s hands, if it is the fulfillment of a supernatural prophecy, it would predict that you would be less willing to take costly action – costly and sometimes extreme action – to prevent global risks such as climate change.”
Similarly, if you feel there is no collective future, you are less likely to support policies that affect the entire community, such as higher taxes to fund efforts to decarbonize the atmosphere.
Study of the psychology of thinking about the end of the world
The researchers conducted six pilot studies, which included a total of 2,079 participants, and a pre-registered study of 1,409 people in the US and Canada.
The purpose of pre-registered studies is to increase transparency and reduce the risks of bias, such as “making hypotheses after the results are known” (harking) – when scientists adjust their original hypothesis to fit their test results instead of accepting the data, leading to their hypothesis being rejected.
Participants came from a variety of religious backgrounds: Catholic, mainline Protestant, evangelical Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, and non-religious. Their average age was 50 years; The genders appeared to be balanced; The majority of participants identified ethnically as White (about a quarter overall identified as Black/African American, Hispanic/Latino, or Asian), and economic backgrounds varied.
They were shown a list of five global risks:
- Economic (for example, supply chain collapse; debt crisis)
- Environment (natural disasters; failure to mitigate climate change)
- Geopolitical (nuclear war; collapse of nation states)
- Social (global pandemic; erosion of social solidarity)
- Technical (artificial intelligence; disinformation)
Participants were then asked questions to determine how close they felt to the end of the world; Will humans cause the end, or will it come about through divine and/or cosmic intervention; Did they feel they had any control over the events leading to the end of the world; And the validity of the feelings, or how they felt about the Holocaust – was it good or bad?
They found that while the end of the world seems “distant and abstract” to most people, one in three contemporary Americans consider the apocalypse to be “personal and imminent.”
“People who think the world will end in their lifetime view global risks like climate change, pandemics or AI as more serious, they fear them more than other people, and they are more likely to want to take costly actions to prevent them,” Billett said.
How thinking about the end of the world helps us deal with uncertainty
Hopefully we can learn something from this study, but it depends on how you feel about the end of the world.
As Billett explained, some people believe that nothing good will happen after the end of the world: “Like if there’s a nuclear war, that’s it. Everybody’s dead.”
“But others believe it will be followed by a utopia in which the earth will be restored, especially for the righteous,” he told DW. unwritten science host.
How you feel about the end of the world is personal. But thinking about the end of the world is also a collective process, Billett said — we’re all involved, no matter how we, as individuals, think or feel about the end of the world.
And because end-of-the-world thinking is a collective process, it can help people deal with the fragility of their groups, communities and our civilizations, he said.
“If you believe that you have a personal role in the apocalypse, that your actions matter, and you believe that there will be a utopia after that, then you can tolerate the risk [global] Threats that are disturbing [other] People,” Billett said. “There is evidence that these beliefs help us cope with an uncertain world.”
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbani
Editor’s note: Matthew Billet of the University of California, Irvine and his colleagues, Sindell JM White of York University, Canada, and Azim Sharif and Ara Norenzayan of the University of British Columbia, Canada, published their peer-reviewed study in APA PsychNet.
An open-access pre-print version is also available from January 2026 available here.