Extreme weather events are becoming impossible to ignore, and as climate change puts pressure on brands and people alike, which initiatives can boost the future wellbeing of the Earth? Canvas8 spoke to social psychologist Kimberly Doell about her research on creating positive behavioural change.
Scope
Though climate change is more salient than ever, getting people to engage in mitigating efforts is proving difficult. So, some institutions are turning to behavioural science. Halfway through the 2030 Agenda, the United Nations adjusted its vision to boost the Sustainable Development Goals with the UN 2.0 Quintet of Change. This policy brief includes data, digital skills, innovation, foresight, and behavioural science, all of which are aimed at making up for lost time in the battle against climate change. Additionally, in June 2024, the sixth annual UN Behaviour Science Week kicked off, exploring how methods and theories from anthropology, psychology, sociology, economics, and cognitive science can combine to offer solutions to the impending pressures of climate change. [1]
This shift in the Sustainable Development Goals mission reflects the surge in climate anxiety felt by people across the world. In Australia, more than 80% of students surveyed by Curtin University in 2021/22 said they were ‘concerned’ or ‘very concerned’ about the climate crisis – feelings that have no doubt been exacerbated by wildfires and coral bleaching in the country. [2][3][4]In the UK, meanwhile, worsening floods have set off climate change alarm bells, with research finding that 70% of 12- to 18-year-olds are worried about the world they will inherit. [5][6]And in America, six in ten Gen Zers and Yers see climate change as a critical threat to national interests, its immediacy highlighted by extreme heat waves in 2023. [7][8]
“It's quite evident that climate change is currently one of the greatest threats facing humanity,” says Dr. Kimberly Doell, a social psychologist and the lead author of a paper titled ‘Addressing climate change with behavioral science: A global intervention tournament in 63 countries’. Canvas8 spoke to her to understand the lengths to which people will go to counteract climate change and the effects of geography, culture, and political beliefs on intervention effectiveness.
Why is this topic important to understand?
After I finished my PhD, I really wanted to devote a lot of my skill set to making the world a little bit of a better place. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time and I got sucked into the psychology of the climate change world. During my first postdoc, I was looking at how to promote different types of core environmental behaviours, which is how I got into this research, and it's something that I'm very passionate about.
There are a lot of gaps in the research, unfortunately. In environmental psychology and even in the greater psychology world, we often tend to focus on studying the brain. This involves studying how and why people behave the way that they do, and the majority of the work that we look at recruits participants from WEIRD samples. This stands for ‘Western-Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic’, which often represents the minority of human beings on the planet, but 85% of all research in psychology is conducted in English-speaking countries and involves WEIRD participants.
What did you want to find out?
We wanted to understand which intervention is best at promoting many different facets of climate change mitigation. I wanted to run an intervention tournament where we tested many different interventions among a huge sample of participants. My co-author wanted to test one or two interventions across the planet so that we got a more generalised understanding of whether or not those interventions would work on a huge scale. So, we put the two ideas together and this is how we came up with this ridiculous project.
I say it's ridiculous because, at the time, we were thinking of testing four or five different interventions in 10 or 15 countries, which we thought would be amazing. In the end, we tested 11 different interventions across a total sample size of just under 60,000 participants from 63 countries. The outcome variables we tested included ‘belief in climate change’, ‘support for climate change mitigation policy’, ‘willingness to share climate mitigation information on social media’, and ‘effortful behaviour’. Somehow, we accidentally conducted the largest experiment in the psychology of climate change, which is always funny to think about, but it kind of worked for us.
What were your key findings?
What we found first of all was that belief in climate change internationally, or at least in the 63 countries we tested, was much higher than predicted. It was sitting close to 86%, which is higher than the roughly 70% that surveys over the last five to ten years have suggested. So, it seems people have really shifted their beliefs in the last few years. We also saw huge support for the climate mitigation policies that we tested. I was expecting the support from participants to be somewhere between 50% and 60%, but they were sitting at 72% internationally.
We also tested behaviours. For the low-effort behaviour, we explained to participants that eating plant-based two out of three meals a day would cut their carbon-related food emissions by up to 60%. We asked them to share this knowledge on social media and 50% of people did so. Then, we asked participants to engage in a high-effort task. We told them that for every page of this very cognitively demanding number sorting task they engaged in, we were going to donate one tree to the Eden Reforestation Project on their behalf – for up to eight trees. We found that 50% of participants across the planet completed every single part of this task, which was a huge effort. Thanks to these efforts, we managed to plant over 300,000 trees!
When analysing how interventions affected these tasks and beliefs, we found something a little bit odd. Their effectiveness really varied across our four outcome variables, but we also found that when an intervention worked well for one outcome variable – belief in climate change, for example – it often backfired on the others. This makes the entire problem a lot more complicated and explains why we don’t see as much movement on the climate change front as we probably should. Additionally, an initiative might work really well in one country and then almost equally backfire in another country. To capture the dynamic nature of these interventions, we made the Climate Intervention Webapp. On the site, you can break up participants according to demographic factors like age, political orientation, culture, and country of residence to see which interventions are the least or most effective – though, as a disclaimer, you should ignore results for any sample size below 30.
Insights and opportunities
Gamifying eco-efforts
“People believe in climate change. They're willing to support policies, and the majority of people will do everything they can in order to protect the environment, even when it comes at the cost of a lot of effort, a lot of time, and very boring tasks,” says Dr. Doell. Whether it’s doing a complicated and dull task or changing their diet, sustainably-minded individuals across the world will do what they can to mitigate their impact on the environment. And yet there is often an intention-action gap when it comes to sustainability efforts. Gamification has become the next frontier in nudging the public to make better choices for the environment. For instance, Japanese authorities created a treasure hunt with bins that feature popular characters to decrease littering. Meanwhile, The Waste Game encourages Irish university students to adopt more eco-friendly behaviours, offering reward points and badges as they complete levels in the waste management game.
Eluding political divides
It is often assumed that people on either end of the political spectrum have vastly different beliefs and policy expectations for climate action. However, Dr. Doell suggests that “there is very little difference between people who were politically left- and right-winged internationally for policy support.” Her research on the impact of climate interventions shows that while liberal-leaning citizens believe and support climate policy more than conservatives, there is no statistical difference in their efforts to boost environmental wellbeing. Self-identified conservatives still act sustainably despite not believing in climate change. The Rest is Politics podcast shows how a balance of opposing opinions can bridge political differences in the UK with balanced, in-depth, and intimate debates from both sides of the divide. But equally, adapting messaging to remove potentially divisive rhetoric around sustainability could help more diverse audiences adopt eco-friendly habits like eating plant-based food.
Brand transparency
Dr. Doell’s research indicated that roughly 86% of people globally believe in climate change, which means that environmental sustainability is fast becoming a minimum expectation for brands instead of a ‘nice to have’. Yet over half of people believe that companies are misleading the public when reporting their sustainability credentials. [9] Whether it’s Lufthansa's 'green fares' being called out as greenwashing or the UK’s ad regulator reprimanding Repsol for greenwashing, the public is keeping a close eye on brands’ eco-efforts. This has subsequently led to ‘greenhushing’, whereby brands avoid publicising their climate-friendly actions to evade accusations of pushing ‘woke agendas’ from one side or being bashed for greenwashing from the other. Other brands are breaking the mould and appealing to eco-conscious consumers with radical transparency. Armedangels decided to drop any sustainable or eco-friendly claims (because ‘sustainable products don’t exist’) and instead push for a ‘less is more’ approach from consumers.
Hyper-localised solutions
“An intervention that works for me isn’t necessarily going to be the best intervention for you,” says Dr. Doell. “We call this ‘message tailoring.’” Understanding how local residents navigate and express their values will help brand initiatives resonate better. In the Asia-Pacific region, many eco-minded citizens have been changing their habits to align with their values, but these actions deviate slightly from the global average. APAC residents are more likely to choose sustainable products or services (49% versus 43%) or avoid optional or leisure flights (38% versus 35%). However, they are less likely to recycle or compost household trash (49% versus 62%) and won’t avoid or eat less meat (27% versus 31%). [10] Instead of leaning exclusively on sustainability credentials, Singapore-based oat milk brand Oatside is winning people over by appealing to the region’s sense of humour, while the Vietnamese restaurant chain Pizza 4P’s appeals to eco-conscious foodies by focusing on local communities and memorable restaurant experiences.
