No matter the limits of the study, though, comparing an academic study, even one that's biased by the author's ideology and worldviews in general (like any and every scientific study every written, especially those about political issues) with a purely activist action is questionable. The very process behind them are different. Plastic straws ban was just impulsed by some viral videos of turtles with straws stuck in their noses. There's a logical chain of event which makes considering this as "virtue signaling" a fair analysis. It's questionnable to assume academics who linked environmental consciousness with masculinity were actually virtue signaling and looking for some recognition when it could just be that their worldview and past experiences "naturally" lead to such hypotheses and the way they built their study just proved their point due to how they were designed.
Secondly, the way you hierarchize what you consider real issues vs unimportant ones also betrays your own position and is by no means absolute, AND it's not a good argument I believe. 99%¨of what I see on HN is not relevant to actual problems as you define them, for starters. And more than 99% of research activity is disconnected from any of those issues, and making all research focus on such issues wouldn't even help anyway, or so I believe. The academic study you refer to does not by any means claim to be revolutionnary when it comes to solving environmental issues, but it is very plausible that a part of why so many people don't care much about the environment is tied to sociocultural factors.
You managed to crystallize my exact thoughts into words.
None of this crap really fixes anything, it's just a way for Western people to pander to a hyper-liberal worldview that "solves" peripheral problems because it's too privileged to fully understand the central problems facing the world.
I read a paper someone posted on here a few months back that described men as less environmentally conscious when their masculinity is threatened. The experiment itself was poorly structured and rife with assumptions of what constitutes environmental consciousness and threats to masculinity. I bring this up because it's an example of multiple academics devoting their time to totally nonessential problems in an effort to gain recognition in the winds of a hyper-liberal zeitgeist.
Hunger, access to goods, guaranteed medical care, literacy, freedom from tyranny and corruption, democratic institutions in the third world, clean water.....these are some of the actual problems that face the world.
Single-use plastics are a problem too, but plastic straws are not the central aspect nor the simplest low-hanging fruit with which to begin tackling the plastics problem.