It turns out many Americans aren’t great at identifying which personal decisions contribute most to climate change, often misjudging their climate impact.

A study recently published by the National Academy of Sciences found that when asked to rank actions, such as swapping a car that uses gasoline for an electric one, carpooling or reducing food waste, participants weren’t very accurate when assessing how much those actions contributed to climate change, which is caused mostly by the release of greenhouse gases that happen when fuels like gasoline, oil and coal are burned.

“People over-assign impact to actually pretty low-impact actions such as recycling, and underestimate the actual carbon impact of behaviors much more carbon intensive, like flying or eating meat,” said Madalina Vlasceanu, report co-author and professor of environmental social sciences at Stanford University.

The top three individual actions that help the climate, including avoiding plane flights, choosing not to get a dog and using renewable electricity, were also the three that participants underestimated the most. Meanwhile, the lowest-impact actions were changing to more efficient appliances and swapping out light bulbs, recycling, and using less energy on washing clothes. Those were three of the top four overestimated actions in the report.

There Are Many Reasons People Misjudge Their Climate Impact

Vlasceanu said marketing focuses more on recycling and using energy-efficient light bulbs than on why flights or dog adoption are relatively bad for the climate, so participants were more likely to give those actions more weight.

How the human brain is wired also plays a role.

“You can see the bottle being recycled. That’s visible. Whereas carbon emissions, that’s invisible to the human eye. So that’s why we don’t associate emissions with flying,” said Jiaying Zhao, who teaches psychology and sustainability at the University of British Columbia.

Zhao added it’s easier to bring actions to mind that we do more often. “Recycling is an almost daily action, whereas flying is less frequent. It’s less discussed,” she said. “As a result, people give a higher psychological weight to recycling.”

Read the full article about people miscalculating climate impact by Caleigh Wells at The Associated Press.