Behavioural Insights for Climate Action
In this summary of Professor Tobias Brosch’s paper, we talk about the need for a rapid behavioural shift towards more sustainable lifestyles if we want to mitigate climate change. Importantly, the paper describes some key behavioural levers and provides examples of concrete applications to promote change, along with a scientific assessment of each recommendation. Read this and get up to speed.
The scope of the problem
So far, policy interventions to promote sustainable behaviours have been based predominantly on information provision (e.g., communication campaigns), financial incentives (e.g., CO2 taxes), and legal bans (e.g., inefficient lightbulbs). Unfortunately, legal and fiscal measures can lead to reactance and protest, and communication campaigns have often proven inefficient.
The good news is that behavioural science offers important insights into human judgment and decision-making processes which can be used to improve the design of the aforementioned interventions or develop complementary strategies.
These complementary tools are necessary since human information-processing mechanisms are not currently optimised to recognise the threats posed by climate change. Across millennia, homo sapiens mainly had to deal with immediate and concrete dangers that that could easily be seen, heard, felt, touched or smelled.
Climate change is largely removed from our direct sensorial experience. It is a slow-moving, complex, abstract, probabilistic phenomenon that can only be studied in statistical terms, e.g., by tracking long-term changes in temperature patterns.
Behaviourally informed policy needs to overcome these processing limitations by focusing on the directly experienceable aspects of climate change and by leveraging multiple motivational systems to increase the personal relevance of climate change action.
Climate change : a challenge for the human brain
Human judgments and decisions are based on the interaction of two processing styles: a fast, intuitive processing style based on associations and similarities, strongly linked to affect and emotion, and a slower, rule-based processing style that requires cognitive effort.
Usually the two systems operate together and integrate analytic thinking and experience-based affective signals into adaptive behavioural reactions.
In the case of climate change, analytic processing may conclude that climate change statistics point toward a serious threat. However, if the intuitive system, which requires experiential input, fails to send the corresponding emotional warning signal, a discrepancy between the output of the two systems occurs. Which means people might not take the right course of action.
Psychological barriers that can impede sustainable behaviour can be organised according to five categories:
Besides these barriers to sustainable behaviour, behavioural science allows us to identify a number of interventions that can help increase individual motivation to act on climate change.
Behavioural levers and examples of concrete applications
How? By overcoming processing limitations, harnessing diverse motivational systems, and facilitating decision-making in concrete choice situations:
To note: in the original paper (see link below), you can also find information about the level of confidence of each strategy, based on experimental evidence, or on the application of large-scale interventions in specific contexts.
The right strategy for the right population
These strategies can be adapted and tailored to a range of population segments differing in their pre-existing values, environmental attitudes, and motivations:
Individuals with strong pro-environmental preferences — they should already be sensitive to the urgency to act on climate change and will mainly benefit from information about the most efficient actions they can take.
Individuals who do not yet have strong beliefs about the necessity to act — they may be best targeted by communications based on moral and social aspects or by changing aspects of the choice architecture.
Individuals who refuse to recognise the necessity for pro-environmental behaviour change — they may potentially be receptive to interventions emphasising personal co-benefits, for example gains in social status.
Last but not least, it is important to keep in mind that human behaviour is always influenced by contextual factors. Thus, these recommendations are not general panaceas that will work irrespective of individual (e.g., ideology) or structural (e.g., local governance context) differences.
SOURCE:
Brosch, T. (2020) Behaviour Insights for Climate Action. Geneva Science-Policy Interface. Can be downloaded here.