Behavioural Science, a Tool for Change to Tackle Environmental Challenges
We’re big fans of Rare and are pleased to interview Kevin Green, their Vice President, Center for Behavior & the Environment. Kevin collaborates with a variety of people — from field staff to researchers — and therefore brings a holistic take on how to use behavioural science for sustainable outcomes. In this interview, he talks about using behavioural science as a complementary set of tools for change.
Behaven — Hi Kevin, it’s great to talk to you today. First, can you tell us more about yourself ?
Kevin Green: Sure! I'm Kevin Green and I lead the Center for Behavior & the Environment at Rare. We’re a team of behavioural scientists, social scientists, designers, trainers, facilitators working to help spread the best insights from the science of human behaviour into more environmental solutions worldwide. And my background is a bit in anthropology, a bit in economics, and a bunch of years trying to figure out how to apply what we've learnt about how humans are motivated and how they make decisions, to some really tricky environmental challenges around the world.
In your opinion, how can behavioural science benefit the environment and improve sustainability?
The way I often like to think about it is that those of us who have been working to solve environmental challenges for decades have had the misfortune of relying on a set of tools or levers for change that somewhat constrain our ability to have the influence on people. At Rare, we think about all environmental challenges as behavioural challenges fundamentally. Oftentimes people are the problem, or at least a big part of the problem, so our belief is that they are equally a part of the solution if we can effectively motivate, inspire and enable them to change. That’s been true for forever, but in the recent history of the environmental movement, we've relied a lot on three key tools:
Changing the rules and hoping that people follow them — in a lot of places where we have really robust enforcement, that might work. But in places where enforcement is difficult, people won't always follow the rules.
Changing the costs of the behaviour, either by providing material incentives or by taking these incentives away — paying people to do something better is a really powerful tool, but often material incentives create unintended consequences or don't last. So that’s a powerful but limited tool as well.
The third tool is probably the original sin of the modern environmental movement, i.e. information — tell people how bad the state of the environment is, whichever challenge it is that you're working on, and hope that they're going to update their behaviour as a result of that information. If we know anything about our species, it's that this doesn't always work.
So the biggest transformative impact that behavioural science can have on solving challenges ranging from biodiversity loss to deforestation to climate change, is opening up a broader set of tools for influencing and enabling behaviour change. We think about these things falling into these categories:
Emotional appeals — how to use the right emotional levers to help inspire behaviour change.
Social influences — we care about what other people think about us. We're inherently social animals who want to be perceived well by our colleagues and friends, so social influences have a big impact on our behaviour.
Choice architecture or the context of decision making — the architecture of our decision making often has as much of an impact on our behaviours as does the actual choices that we're presented with. By better designing the environment in which we're making decisions, we can generate better outcomes.
Long story short, behavioural science isn't so much as providing a complete alternative, as it is providing a complement to the toolkit that we've often relied on to solve environmental challenges. It just puts a lot more arrows in our quiver as we're trying to figure out how to get these challenges solved.
How do you translate science about these tools to practice?
We think about it actually as both science to practice and practice to science. We have a unique opportunity to exist at the boundary to help make sure not only that the best insights in social psychology, cognitive decisions, behavioural economics, neuroscience, political science and anthropology are all actually getting applied to projects, but also that what's being learnt in the wild can get translated back to the researchers to update what the science is telling us.
The scientists that we work with often tell us that it's very hard for them to know what's going to be most useful. Or to know how to translate the methods and the language of their discipline into something that is going to be of use to somebody out in the field who's just trying to figure out how to fix a problem. We have to be willing to radically simplify and organise the science in a way that is a little bit more accessible to a broad audience. And so we try our best to work with great fidelity to what is accurate, according to the science, but at the same time to simplify what is often very complex research to something that is useful in the field. That's a really important gap to fill in our experience.
Rare is working in many countries around the world. How do you adapt interventions to the context of the different countries you’re working with?
We are trying to be a part of solving this problem of WEIRD research. Our core strategy for this is to test everything. We may be relying on research that was conducted in a very Western Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic context, probably in the US or Europe, and trying to apply it to a context in Latin America or in Southeast Asia that may be wildly different. So testing is a really important part of the process in the projects that we work on. We often have to spend a lot of time convincing people of the importance of this but we cannot assume that something that seemed to work really well in the United States, for instance, is going to translate perfectly to somewhere, say in South America.
We call our process ‘Behavior-Centered Design’ (BCD). It looks like a lot of other applied behavioural science processes. We develop some hypotheses about what is going to generate the change that we’re seeking. Then a core part of our process is to develop a prototype of what that idea will look like in the real world and finding ways to test it, whether it's quantitative or qualitative or just very basic, to determine what works before we do anything at scale. It's one of those corners that you often want to cut, but it is essential.
We’re also trying to collaborate with researchers when we are working on projects in non-WEIRD contexts to determine how to connect this to novel research to generate a bigger body of knowledge in behavioural sciences outside of WEIRD contexts.
In behavioural science, it can be difficult to evaluate the impact of interventions on the longer-term. Have you found a way to assess the long-term effects of your projects?
One of the biggest challenges that we have in applied behavioural science and in the behaviour change programming world at large is maintenance. Oftentimes the way to deal with this is to commit early on to a long-term evaluation. But it's very hard, particularly if you're working on projects in the not-for-profit or NGO space, which is a lot of what we and our partners do. Projects are often funded through philanthropy or grant-making. Grant-makers generally want a time horizon through which they can decide whether or not their project worked, but you may have to be monitoring something for ten years to know whether the behaviour change sticks.
We've got to figure out how to change the way that we think about the time horizon of projects. There's this idea that you develop a solution kind of in a vacuum, go out and put it into the real world, and then measure its impact to know if it works. In reality, it's a lot messier than that. And if we're being honest about how this stuff works, we have to treat it as a continuous learning process. Of course, you can set hypotheses ahead of time and test things to know whether or not they failed. But that's a scientific method. In the real world, you're just trying to tinker over time and make incremental improvements to get a little bit better.
And yeah, it's tricky, it's one of the hardest things that we are dealing with in this growing field of applied behavioural and social science, where we're trying to solve really complex, wicked social challenges that don't have a yes or no answer on whether or not a particular challenge has been has been solved.
It’s definitely a tricky question and it's interesting to hear what everybody has to say on this. By gathering people's opinions, we might find a solutions! Last question on environmental behaviours: in your opinion, what are the challenges and barriers that needs to be overcome to encourage the development of environmental behaviours?
Social influences are one of the linchpin levers of change in the environmental context. There is a lot of pro and anti environmental behaviour that happens in ways that aren't necessarily observable by our reference groups or our social networks. If they were, we would be acting a bit differently. One of the biggest categories of new thinking that we can bring is how to make best use of social influences, how to communicate the right norms in contexts where they might not be a very clear, and how to create experiences that allow us to generate collective demand for a more pro-environmental behaviours.
As individuals, we may not even know what is expected of us. Oftentimes it requires collective experiences to understand what others expect of us. How can we make behaviours that often occur in private more observable to get the reputational benefits or costs associated with doing or not doing that behaviour? This is a category that is very often under leveraged, but that represents a big opportunity for environmental behavioural projects.