“People believe all sorts of things about how the world’s going to end,” said Matthew Billet, a social psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, in an interview with Science unscripted hosts Conor Dillon and Gabriel Borrud. He and colleagues set out to map how those beliefs influence how people judge and respond to global risks.
The team identified four core dimensions that shape attitudes about existential threats: how soon people expect the world to end, what they imagine will cause it, whether they feel personally responsible for causing or preventing it, and what they expect will happen afterward. They also measured whether apocalyptic outcomes felt positive or negative.
Their research combined six pilot studies (2,079 participants in the US and Canada) and a pre-registered main study of 1,409 people. Participants, with a mean age of about 50, came from diverse religious backgrounds (Catholic, Mainline and Evangelical Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, and non-religious). Genders were roughly balanced; most identified as white, while roughly a quarter identified as Black/African American, Hispanic/Latino, or Asian. Economic backgrounds varied. Pre-registration was used to increase transparency and reduce post-hoc hypothesis changes.
Participants evaluated five categories of global risk: economic (for example, supply-chain collapse or debt crises); environmental (natural disasters or unchecked climate change); geopolitical (nuclear war or state collapse); societal (pandemics or erosion of social cohesion); and technological (artificial intelligence risks or disinformation). Researchers asked whether the end felt imminent, whether humans or divine/cosmic forces would cause it, whether respondents felt they could influence outcomes, and how they emotionally appraised an apocalypse.
Key findings: most people view the end of the world as distant and abstract, but roughly one in three contemporary Americans say the idea of an apocalypse feels personal and imminent. Those who expect the end within their lifetime view global risks—climate change, pandemics, AI—as more severe, report greater fear, and express stronger willingness to support costly actions to prevent them.
Beliefs about causes and what follows the end also matter for public policy. Respondents who see the apocalypse as divinely ordained or as a fulfillment of prophecy are less likely to support costly prevention measures such as climate mitigation. Likewise, those who feel there is no collective future are less inclined to back community-focused policies (for example, higher taxes to fund decarbonization). By contrast, believing one has a personal role to play and expecting a positive post-apocalyptic outcome can make people more tolerant of exposure to threatening information and more motivated to act.
The authors argue that end-of-world thinking serves both personal and collective psychological functions: it helps people cope with uncertainty and the fragility of social groups by providing meaning, agency, or expectations about renewal.
The study, “End of world beliefs are common, diverse, and predict how people perceive and respond to global risks,” by Matthew Billet, Cindel J.M. White, Azim Shariff, and Ara Norenzayan, was published as a preprint in January 2026 and was not peer-reviewed at the time of the interview. Edited by Zulfikar Abbany.