With COP27 fresh in our minds, the time seems right to look again at the debate of how we might persuade people to adopt lower carbon lifestyles.  Behavioural scientists will often have a range of approaches that are used for this end, often applied broadly across the population. 

But as behavioural science increasingly works with social and market researchers, an understanding is starting to come to the fore of the different considerations that are needed when engaging with different segments of the population.  This is arguably something that behavioural scientists need to integrate more effectively in the way they approach problems:  psychology’s ‘unit of analysis’ is typically less about broad societal structures and much more about the individual.  Compare this to sociology which stratifies society based on a range of different criteria such as wealth, income, education, family background, and power.

Given the ways that societal differences have long been identified to influence attitudes, behaviours and societal outcomes (with the ‘class pay gap’ as a case in point), then surely this needs to be a bigger part of the behavioural scientist’s consideration.  Right now, arguably, we are often focused on the more immediate influences on behaviour (our immediate environment for example) and exploring the different psychological mechanisms that explain our behaviour in relation to these.  But, surely, we also need to more consistently identify the broader influences on behaviour and understand the psychological mechanisms that are relevant to the way these shape our behaviour.

One such example we can use to illustrate this is socio-economic status, or social class, and its relationship to climate behaviours.  We will take a broad-brush approach to this by examining the differences between the wealthy, the professional classes and then those on lower incomes (for analysis of many Western societies at least).

By examining the different position of each of these in relation to sustainability, we can a) understand the different mechanisms at play for each and b) make suggestions for how, as behavioural scientists, we engage with these groups differently to facilitate more positive outcomes.

The wealthy

A report by Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute indicates that the world’s wealthiest 1 percent are responsible for 15 percent of carbon emissions, nearly twice as much as the world’s poorest 50 percent. While there is a great deal of debate about the value of carbon footprints as a tool for changing climate behaviour, this disparity suggests that the psychology of the wealthy deserves closer scrutiny.

This group of people are clearly hard to research, and while there is plenty of debate concerning the psychological mechanisms there is often little evidence to work with.  But some areas that might be useful to explore.  First, albeit in a different context, Karen Douglas has talked about motivated ignorance and identified three types:

·       Epistemic – the desire for an explanation, certainty and simplicity

·       Existential – the desire to be safe and secure and have control

·       Social – the desire to fit in and feel good about ourselves

It may well be that a maintaining a high-carbon lifestyle is underpinned by social motivations (fitting in with similarly wealthy peers) but in addition there are many ways that feeling safe can have high carbon implications (e.g. driving an SUV).

In terms of the epistemic considerations, then the just world theory, could be relevant. The theory suggests human beings are motivated to believe the world is a fair place – as such holding and maintaining a high carbon lifestyle is something that is merited by this group. Related to this is the notion of ‘exceptionalism’ leading to optimistic visions of the potential to use wealth and technology to find solutions to climate change.  It could be all too easy to rationalise current lifestyle choices with the optimistic notion that future fixes are in the pipeline.

The psychology of very high net worth groups therefore clearly deserves greater focus, not least as these are often people in positions of considerable power so their decisions can impact many other people.  Alongside this, the highly concentrated nature of this group means that understanding how to engage with them effectively could be very efficient in terms of delivering change.

The professional classes

Turning now to professional classes, this is a very interesting group psychologically because, at least in part, the rise of the knowledge economy had meant that education and credentials are key for defining their qualifications for the dominant occupations of this group. Professor in Geography, Matthew Huber has suggested that their socio-cultural milieu prioritises knowledge in general— keeping up with current affairs, doing your investigations, and making sure your facts are straight.

As such, Huber suggests that debates around climate are often conducted less through political debate and more through the notion that climate change could be solved through a series of technocratic solutions. The climate change debate for the professional classes often prioritises knowledge and a coming-to-consensus on ideas rather than a political debate concerning power and distribution of resources. This slips into climate change becoming attributed to the inaction of the population due to a lack of understanding of the issues or misinformation – and less likely to be attributed to the wider social, economic and power structures that might mitigate action being taken. 

Another focus in on reduction of consumption. The relative wealth nature of this group will mean they typically have high carbon footprints but alongside this they will be acutely aware of the damaging effects of this on the climate.  The resulting dissonance or ‘carbon guilt’ means there is a drive for reducing consumption, such as flying less or buying fewer clothes, as viable actions to address climate change.

This then creates calls for ‘de-growth’ involving wider change and restructuring of society so that we all manage on less.  While this makes sense for the professional classes who have the means to do this, the calls are in fact often made for broader societal or ‘systems’ change so that this applies more broadly in the population (which as we shall see below is of debateable value.)

The nature of engagement with professional classes may then be to challenge the technocratic nature of the dialogue and to call for a better understanding of the societal structures that have led to these disparities and the implications for carbon footprints. In a way then the prioritisation of knowledge is pushed back on this group, encouraging them to engage in a more political debate and explore the political and policy routes to remedy this.

Lower income groups

While the size of this group of the lower income population means it is important one to effect change, arguably, it is the professional classes that are typically setting the media and public policy agenda on climate change.  The danger here is that calls for ‘managing on less’ in the interests of climate change will not necessarily find support in this wider group.

This is not because this is a group that is unconcerned, indeed research has found a great deal of concern about climate change in low-income groups.  This is despite the “Environmental belief paradox” the surprising tendency to misperceive groups that are the most environmentally concerned and most vulnerable to environmental impacts as least concerned.

The issue, however, is that for this group their living standards have fallen with increasing levels of job insecurity, mounting debt and more challenging access to public services. The levels of stress and insecurity that characterise much of this group means that a ‘scarcity’ mindset creates limited bandwidth to prioritise climate behaviours, with a range of other concerns (e.g. finding employment, shopping for cheap food, managing access to public services) higher in the hierarchy of priorities.

And in the context of calls at COP27 for rich nations to do more in terms of reducing their carbon footprint, the reality is that this falls on deaf ears of the hugely increased population, even within those rich countries, that are finding it difficult to pay their bills.

This is therefore a group which is much less likely to respond to appeals for having less and for de-growth but instead need to be able to see the way that climate behaviours can lead to benefits such as more job security, access to stable housing and affordable energy tariffs. The focus on the negative for this group rather than potential for material gains is unlikely to result in the mass, popular engagement for action.

Conclusions

If we are to use behavioural science as a lens to understand behaviour, we need to make sure that our lens is not always ‘zoomed in’ on the individual and their immediate situation but that we also ‘zoom out,’ so that we can see the wider social, cultural, economic and political environment.  When we do this, we can see more clearly how our responses and behaviours are not only the result of our individual psychology but are also socially, economically and historically situated.  There is a nuanced balancing act between the individual and these wider ways in which our behaviour is shaped that will inevitably be a source of debate and disagreement. 

But disciplines such as ethnography, geography and sociology (and of course social and market research) offer behavioural scientists a great resource to examine what these broader influences are. In turn this allows us to then see more clearly how we need to call on different psychological mechanisms to better understand the behaviours for each group, which in turn guides us towards more effective avenues to engage that are more likely to result in positive outcomes. 

Behavioural science does not ignore the wider environment but perhaps there is a tendency not to examine the interplay between the societal and individual closely enough. We call for more debate on ways the discipline can better deal with more than one framing at a time, a step surely needed to address the complex and daunting challenges that we are now facing.

The tragic flood conditions in Pakistan are the latest example of the way global warming means we are living in a world that is becoming increasingly inhospitable to humans.  It has long been agreed that it is human activity causing these conditions and yet it seems hard to find ways to deliver reduction in carbon emissions that offer the possibility of a reduction in risk.  Why is this?

Many point to human characteristics that seem to suggest we are not ‘designed’ to deal with climate change.  This argument suggests we are cognitively ill-equipped to take the action needed and as such we are destined to fail.  Quentin Atkinson and Jennifer Jacquet recently reviewed the evidence for this claim in a paper which we are summarising here. Needless to say, they fundamentally challenge this widespread view.

While the authors offer a very convincing take-down of the notion of ‘human deficit’ as a driver of lack of action to combat climate change, the very same case can be made for a wide variety of other examples we cover here on Frontline Be Sci where humans are seen as not up to the job:  from conspiracy theories and misinformation to debt management and health protection. Atkinson and Jacquet outline the way that psychological research is used to construct this argument of human failings, not only misrepresents the literature creating a misleading narrative, but also misses the opportunity to look to cultural and social mechanisms that are more potent tools for bringing about change.

To explore this more deeply, we outline the evidence that is often cited to suggest that humans are unable to respond to climate change, followed by a summary of how Atkinson and Jacquet dismantle the case.

The evidence of humans being unable to respond

In a New York Times opinion piece, psychologist Dan Gilbert argued that people in the US are less worried about climate change than terrorism due to the way that the human brain is not evolved to respond to threats like global warming.  This notion is supported a wide range of work from cognitive psychology citing psychological ‘barriers,’ ‘biases,’ or ‘challenges’ that hinder climate action.

The most commonly cited barriers include the human tendency to discount events that are remote in time and space, problems perceiving slow changes, and conflict between self-interest and the common good. In addition to these sorts of ‘heuristics and biases’, Atkinson and Jacquet set out the way that a wide range of psychology theory is used to explain the lack of climate action, including tendency to conform to social norms and to moral tribalism, denial, habit, excessive optimism, rebound effects, tokenism, the fundamental attribution error, prospect theory, and excessive faith in the supernatural or technological fixes.

Of course, few psychologists claim that ‘psychological barriers’ are insurmountable, that humans are completely incapable of mitigating dangerous climate change, or indeed that there are not also important structural barriers to defeat.  And clearly there is value in research seeking to understand how different people perceive, process, and act on the many challenges that climate change presents. But, as the authors point out, these sorts of findings nevertheless together suggest a reading of the psychological evidence that:

“essentializes humans’ lack of progress, either explicitly as a product of universal human nature or implicitly by portraying the human mind as a collection of evolved psychological barriers to climate action.”

Doing this not only distorts psychological research and theory but also creates a narrative that potentially reduces the propensity for tackling climate change.  

Dismantling of this evidence

Atkinson and Jacquet set about dismantling the case that is presented for human failings, questioning the notion that humans are incapable of taking the steps needed to make change happen. These are set out below:

Minimizing variation within and between populations

Frequently cited psychological barriers are considered to be ‘universal’ such as when Dan Gilbert mentions in his article that

“the human brain evolved to respond to . . . features that terrorism has and that global warming lacks”

But as we know, behaviour is far from universal and a wide variety of polling suggests the way people respond to threat of global warming varies significantly.  Added to this, work by people such as Dan Kahan suggests that cultural institutions, norms, values, and beliefs are frequently key determinants of our individual responses to climate change, not individual human nature. 

Oversimplifying psychological research and its implications for policy

When broadly specified features of human psychology (e.g., future discounting) are identified as barriers to climate action, it risks (a) oversimplifying the link between current research evidence and effective action and (b) producing false confidence in possible strategies to address climate change.

For example, if human psychology is less sensitive to threats that are distant in time and space (future discounting), then action should, in principle, be motivated by emphasizing that dealing with climate change can provide benefits in the here-and- now. But the link between the oft-cited psychological barriers and climate action at scale is never straightforward. For example, a review of the literature in the effectiveness of future discounting actions found that the relationship between perceived proximity of climate change and incentive to act was complicated and contingent on many factors, not least how people valued the resources in question and how they felt about the ease and effectiveness of the actions available to them.

This means that focusing on findings such as psychological distance as a barrier to tackling global warming, can actually overshadow other weapons we have for tackling climate change—such as our ability to actually imagine scenarios in distant times and places. And we may underemphasize the role of structural and cultural factors; to locate future discounting purely as an attribute of human psychology, (a cognitive process), means we fail to examine the cultural values, norms, and incentives that mean we think and act in this way.

Framing climate change as an individual moral dilemma

A focus on psychological barriers and human nature pushes responsibility for climate change onto individual actions. This places responsibility for combating climate change on making changes to individual behaviour, rather through the cultures and behaviour of corporations, governments, and other institutions. For example, research has examined the fit between climate change and the human moral judgment system without considering the structural and policy issues that give rise to these moral dilemmas in the first place.  This focus on individual behaviour reflects a broader pattern in psychology that underemphasises the role of cultural and social structures and is itself the result of a long tradition of individualism in the West.

Moreover, relatively little attention has been paid by psychologists beyond the individual consumer; therefore, the understanding of the psychological influences that shape behaviours of key players within our systems, like politicians, corporate executives, and prominent climate sceptics are poorly understood. What, Atkinson and Jacquet ask, are the prominent psychological characteristics of CEOs who encourage opposition to climate-change policy and research? We are starting to see the way that simply focusing on consumers invites recommendations for light-touch ‘nudges’ rather than the much wider range of interventions that are available if the wider organisational and political systems are the target of change initiatives.

Rationalizing inaction

Finally, Atkinson and Jacquet contest the idea that humans are not biologically designed to solve climate change risks, leading to the rationalizing of inaction. Of course, there is a long history of appeals to human nature or similar biological arguments to justify the status quo and challenge the possibility of change. Indeed, slavery, racism, sexism, and discrimination for sexual orientation have all used appeals to biological innateness as their defence.

While no-one is suggesting that those researching the psychology of climate change are intended to intentionally misinterpret evidence to preserve the status quo, there is an obvious relationship between psychological claims and social arrangements. As the authors put it:

“Perhaps most concerning is the possibility that essentializing climate inaction creates a false perception that a failure to act is not only natural but inevitable.”

Conclusion

Atkinson and Jacquet conclude that social scientists and communicators need to challenge the notion that people are simply a collection of psychological barriers to climate action or that any failure to remedy climate change is due to the evolutionary flaws of the human brain. Instead there is a need to emphasize the huge amount of individual and cultural variation in responses to climate change and be realistic about the generalizability of findings from psychology research.  They point out that this is particularly true for WEIRD populations, frequently living in countries with very powerful institutional actors that are resistant to climate policy.

They also suggest that we need to spell out the way that the most challenging barriers to tackling global warming are not from human biology, but are in fact from human culture. And although psychology shapes the landscape in important ways, current institutions and policies are not biologically determined, no matter how ‘natural’ they seem. They point to the way that a highly individualistic worldview has come to dominate politics, creating a cultural matrix that psychological research needs to help people step outside of, and support a wider understanding of the way culture shapes climate action.

With this in mind, they cite bodies of knowledge that can offer a new agenda for addressing climate action. This includes work on the factors that gave rise to Western norms of self-interest and individualism; how ideology, moral tribalism and online networks influence climate change discourse; how culture trumps the individual conscience; the role of self-conscious emotions, social exposure, and reputation; people’s relationship to ‘the economy’ and curing their obsession with economic growth; how wealthy elites and corporate lobbying can sway decision makers and public opinion; and how new technologies and cultural norms can be harnessed to change the way people eat, travel, work and recreate.

They conclude their paper by citing philosopher Dale Jamieson who noted,

“Ultimately, the failure to take action on climate change rests with our institutions of decision making, not on our ways of knowing”

Clearly climate action is a hugely pressing issue of our time (indeed perhaps the most pressing) but the notion that humans are not designed to make change happen is not limited to this. The lessons learnt here are widespread across a range of issues, not only climate action. 

The authors make a good case and point to an increasing body of evidence that suggests the widespread conceptualisation of humans is too narrow, failing to explain reality. We urgently need a broader reading of the psychology literature to inform public debate and to identify ways to make change happen.

This week we are looking at some lessons from social change movements and seek to identify the implications for behaviour change programmes.  At first sight the toppling of an authoritarian regime such as the overthrow of Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic or the passing of legislation for same sex marriage may not seem to be relevant to the variety of behaviour change challenges that brands and public bodies typically have.  But what might appear to be an organic spontaneous uprising or an inevitable change of sentiment, in fact hides the huge amount of work that goes on behind the scenes by activists that make the change happen.  Understanding what this work involves offers valuable insights for all of us seeking to make change happen.

Indeed, as commentators in the field of social movements have pointed out, (and whose work we draw on), the reality is that widespread change is a highly strategic activity that requires a considerable amount of planning by committed activists.  We consider there are useful lessons from an understanding of this that can inform behaviour change work.

Transactional versus transformational change

Widespread, ‘transformational’ social change involving uprisings and protests can result in sweeping change that once seemed radical and unacceptable.  These often involve a transformation in the way that people think about an issue.  This is in contrast to what is called ‘transactional change’ where the aim is for concrete, near-term changes to behaviour, often incremental in nature. 

Arguably much of commercial and policy behaviour change work uses approaches which might be described as transactional, focused on immediate and tangible outcomes.  While these may offer concrete results, the gains can, however, be modest, at least in the short-term. A transformational approach, by contrast, does not seek to target specific behaviours but instead attempts to alter the ‘climate of public debate’ to make much more far-reaching changes possible. If there is popular backing for an issue then this translates into active, vocal support which can then lead to much more fundamental changes.  This approach can be seen to have been used for same sex marriage, treatment for people with HIV, black rights and the toppling of authoritarian regimes such as Slobodan Milosevic in Slovenia.

Drawing on work by Erica Chenoweth, Seamus Power, and Mark & Paul Engler, we set out below a number of key points from an analysis of these transformation movements that we think are relevant to wider change challenges.

Mental availability:  Symbols are key, helping to keep a movement front of peoples’ minds.  One example of this is from the Egyptian graffiti images were created in Cairo, depicting an event in which a veiled female protestor was beaten and stripped, revealing her blue bra. Graffiti artists represented the event in different ways, over time resulting in a simplified image of a blue bra which was then widely used to symbolize solidarity to the values of the revolution and resistance to oppression.

Humour:  Otpor, the Serbian resistance organisation protesting against the Milosevic regime, deployed its members to carry out hundreds of small, often humorous actions as an act of protest.  For example, in one small Serbian town, activists held a birthday celebration for Milosevic, offering the president gifts such as handcuffs and a one-way ticket to the International Criminal Tribunal at The Hague. This had the effect of conveying a sense that change was possible, but also generating attention, drawing people into the conversations about the possibility of change.

Trigger events:  The global justice movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s had a huge challenge moving public opinion around injustices in the global economy. Activists identified high profile trade summits could create an opening. Major news organizations already sent reporters to cover these events, and the presence of world leaders created a hook for discussion. Meetings of the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank all served as flashpoints of highly publicized dissent that garnered widespread public attention, promoting the cause of the activist movements. So finding points that crystallise the issues and garner attention are often key to motivating the wider public to engage.

Distributed empowerment:  Successful change often involves a distributed membership base, with people empowered to act independently.  The Birmingham Campaign of 1963, led by Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference involved non-violent tactics of sit-ins, boycotts and marches to bring national attention of the efforts of local black leaders to desegregate public facilities in Birmingham, Alabama. The movement was subsequently able to use this as a blueprint for their own local activities resulting in an explosion of premeditated disruption and nonviolent escalation across the South of the the United States.  Thus, equipping people with ways in which they can make change happen on their own terms, in their own localities, while feeling part of a bigger movement seems important.

Appeal to broaden audience:  Transformation change is often driven by an appeal that is as much cultural as political.  TV shows, films, and music concerts are an effective way to connect with people.  Consider the successful Netflix series ‘Don’t look up’ as a case in point not least given the huge investment of time we spend engaged in entertainment. But it is also important to go beyond a narrow predominantly youth base and find cultural events that appeal to a broader base of society.  People sometimes need to be brought into the conversation through entertainment and other cultural activities – the lesson here is to find what people enjoy, and then explore how to integrate behaviour change programmes into these activities.

Consider the key pillars in society:  Decisions about when and how we act are mediated through our various social and professional roles. Understanding what the different institutional and societal pillars are that are obstructing the desired outcomes mean that it is possible to think about strategies for engaging with people who may otherwise be resisting change (and influencing others to do so too).

Active supporters:   One of the key researchers on social movements, Erica Chenoweth, found that the number of supporters who were actively engaged in successful movements often only needed to be quite a small percentage of the total population. She suggested that no campaign failed once they had achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5 percent of the population.

Of course, this is not an insignificant number in absolute terms and needs to be people who were moved to actually take a stand.  Although the goal of transformational movements is to get the support of the majority in society, the number of people who take ownership is critical.  The guidance here is to think through strategies to energise and activate this relatively small percentage of the population, finding ways for them to actively promote the desired outcomes.

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With these points in mind, we can think about challenging ourselves about the implied model of change that we might be operating with programmes for public and private sector bodies.

Models of change

In traditional models of social change there is a notion that if people are to make change happen then they need to steadfastly go about encouraging people to enact the behaviour, the focus being on the ‘transactional’ gains that they can encourage individuals to themselves make. 

This process alone can end in disappointment – it can be hard to encourage people to maintain these sorts of behaviours when all around are not doing so. There are inevitably a wide range of disincentives to make the change happen. 

By contrast, a transformational approach does not centre on incremental gains but instead attempts to alter the climate of public debate to make much more far-reaching changes possible. Author and activist Michael Signer notes that “it’s hard to thank any single individual for altering history; more often, the ship …alters course only because tides are vastly shifting underneath.” A campaign that is thinking in transformational terms attempts to ‘move these deeper waters’.

Of course there will be transactional considerations but the focus is certainly on creating possibilities that might previously have been unable to imagine. As Mark and Paul Engler point out, this is what transformed Milosevic from an entrenched powerbroker into a disgraced and ousted autocrat, and what turned gay marriage from an unpopular fringe issue into a civil-rights crusade whose time had come.

Conclusions

Perhaps a key learning for brands and governments that are often attempting to facilitate purposeful change is to think about a programme in transformational, and not simply transactional, terms.  Transformational campaigns necessarily place a greater focus on the symbolic and while there is no need to abandon a push for concrete gains, other measures of success come to the fore: movement in opinion polls, growing numbers of active participants, the ability to see change in grassroots channels, and the responsiveness of what might have been hard to win over segments of the population as they start to offer support to their mobilizations.

There are of course very significant differences between the activities of social movements and behaviour change programmes by private and public bodies.  Nevertheless, behaviour change programmes often have significant social objectives at their heart and as such we think useful lessons can be drawn, challenging us to rethink some assumptions of what success might look like from these programmes.

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Continuing our theme of ‘value’, this week we are looking at the way this is not simply the result of trading off cost and quality is significantly influenced by social structures.  In particular we are looking at the apparent trade-off that takes place between the purchase of environmentally friendly / sustainable products and their cost.  Do perceptions of value mean that in conditions of financial hardship these are inevitably cast aside?

At one level it seems obvious that we will reduce purchase of sustainable choices. These goods are generally more expensive than conventional options and are perceived as such: hence consumers must be able and willing to pay a higher price in order to purchase products that are sustainable. But whilst ability to pay will constrain choices, this is not the only consideration.  A range of socio-cultural factors are also at play, influencing the way we make this sort of choice.

To understand this, we first need to recognise that humans do not make consumer decisions in an isolated way but we do so in the presence of others. As such, mechanisms such as status and hierarchies have an influence, particularly in the area of consumer goods. On that basis, decision-making for people in lower socio-economic status (SES) groups will not only be shaped by absolute resources available, but also as a function of the way we all assess where we stand on the socio-economic hierarchy.

With this in mind, there is a range of ways in which lower SES status influences purchase decisions.  For example, a low sense of control that comes with low subjective social status, reduces confidence that the future will turn out as hoped for.  In an uncertain environment there is a logic to spending on goods for immediate reward – they have a value to them that may not be realised deferring spend. So we may forgo healthy sustainable choices which might require more upfront investment (e.g. for preparation and storage) for more immediate but perhaps less healthy and sustainable options that can be realised immediately.

Conversely, another reaction to the threat of low perceived status may be through the signalling value of high-status goods. An example of this (we mentioned last week) is the way that teenage mothers can have a very careful marshalling of resources, to purchase visibly high value baby items (such as high-end buggies) to avoid public scrutiny and negative evaluation, and as such work to secure a legitimate maternal identity. 

The point is that what is ‘valued’ goes beyond simple cost quality trade-offs – the social-cultural context plays a key role in shaping perceptions of value. 

Sustainability choices and perceived value

To return to the issue of sustainability, this presents a dilemma, given the products and services are generally more expensive than conventional options. Consumers must be able and willing to pay a higher price in order to engage in this sort of consumption.  How is value navigated in this context?

To help answer this question, Jenny Olson and colleagues examined the socio-cultural factors involved in this sort of decision making.  Their premise was that consumers react to others’ choices, with lower SES groups frequently viewed differently by others for making identical choices. Across five experiments, they found that individuals earning high incomes will be perceived as more moral for choosing more costly, ethical (versus more affordable, conventional) goods. Those in the lowest income bracket are perceived as less moral because they are seen as ‘undeserving’ of the right to make such choices – particularly if receiving government financial support. 

People consider those with ample means have an obligation to provide for those in less privileged social positions by behaving pro-socially, so that when wealthy consumers engage in these behaviours, they are viewed favourably.

Low-income individuals, on the other hand, tend to be seen as more moral when they make thrifty choices. This is due to the way that resisting the urge to spend money is seen as virtuous, so choosing affordable options is seen as financially responsible. Hence the ability to make ethical choices is driven by perceptions of deservingness (i.e. the freedom of choice) which is determined primarily by earning income.

It is hard to imagine that these attitudes are not internalised by people, so that higher earning people in the population are then encouraged to engage in making discretionary donations and behaving pro-socially (meaning greater perceived value for sustainable products) whilst lower earning counterparts are encouraged to identify themselves as thrifty and careful (meaning lower perceived value for sustainable products).

Polarisation in perceived value of sustainable choices?

These mechanisms mean we are in danger of creating a situation where sustainable, and more generally ethical choices, are seen as discretionary, and are only perceived to be of value by people that have higher spending power.  So even if there are lower cost sustainable options available, then these may be avoided by those on lower SES groups for fear of being judged as ‘feckless’ and irresponsible.  Conversely, of course, some may seek to manage the way they are viewed by knowingly investing in sustainable options to secure a legitimate identity, in the same way it was found some teenage mothers did with high-end buggies.

We can see that value in this context comes with a great deal of baggage - value of sustainable choices is in no small part driven by social-cultural cues.  This presents an important challenge as of course concern about the environment is not limited to those in higher SES groups.   One might expect this to be subject to campaigns from groups seeking to facilitate access to low budget sustainable options. To date campaigning  (as far as we can see) has tended to focus on availability of low cost items, as illustrated by the success of Jack Monroe who successfully pushed Asda to reinstate budget products.  Whether campaigning for low-cost sustainable options would gain the same momentum, given the pressures we have outlined, is debateable.

Brands and governments can perhaps help to more effectively navigate the way in which identity, value and sustainability are entwined in this space.  Part of this might be funding ways to offer low-cost sustainable products, albeit we recognise this may be a challenge and require wider investment (from governments or brands).  But in addition, it may be to help people understand the way that their behaviours likely already represent a low carbon footprint versus higher SES groups.  Managing identities is not necessarily always about changing behaviour but perhaps helping to reshape the identity that people have adopted.

If someone in a low SES group can understand the way their carbon footprint is low, then this could be a source of positive identity. It also means that reference points might be created, leading to people challenging and putting pressure on the disproportionate carbon footprint of consumer choices of those in higher SES groups.

In conclusion

Returning to the notion of value, we can see that this is a complex issue that requires a fair amount of unpacking in the context of sustainability.  There are risks for brands and politicians if sustainability choices are only perceived to be of value by the well-off - as the less well-off will surely alienated and detached from these choices which are seen as poor value.  

We think that work can be done to renegotiate meanings in this space, offering more inclusive ways to understand sustainability and drive a notion of shared value in a much broader way. One near term opportunity for brands and governments to support people to understand how their lifestyles are sustainable, rather than the focus always being on specific product or service choices. Handled well, it seems the cost of living crisis could mean there is a real opportunity here, renegotiating our relationship between value and sustainability

Climate change presents us with some significant challenges for ways in which we are to reduce carbon emissions.  The question, as ever, is just how do we address this?  This week we look at the way in which different sorts of interventions can work alongside each other – and the implications for possible interaction effects.  This is part technical but also partly a political values based set of considerations.  We will unpick each of these in turn.

Polling suggests that many people look to governments to take action as well as private companies.  But about half of those questioned also consider that citizens also need to take action.  Of course, we live in a world where individual choices are being asked of us  alongside governments introducing tougher regulations and brands shouldering their responsibilities. 

How do interventions work together?

The issue we then have, as behavioural scientists, is how these different sorts of intervention strategies work alongside each other?  An interesting paper from 2015 unpicks some of the challenges here.   Authors David Hagmann, Emily Ho & George Loewenstein set out that the most effective ways of reducing carbon emissions rely on government interventions, such as taxes, efficiency standards for cars and homes and subsidies for taking up renewable energy sources.

They consider that the most effective policy relates to the use of carbon tax (a tax imposed on the carbon emissions required to produce goods and services).  But despite their effectiveness, they point out that governments have been reluctant to impose them and that by contrast, green energy ‘nudges’ (such as defaulting consumers to green energy providers) are widespread.

Of course, we should be in a position where we can consider a number of different types of intervention so that they work together.  However, the authors found that nudges actually indirectly reduced support for the more substantive measures.  In a series of experiments, respondents were asked to decide whether or not to implement either a carbon tax policy or a green nudge policy. They found that exposing respondents to the potential for a green energy nudge actually diminished their support for a carbon tax.  This effect was only seen when the nudge was related to the same policy area as carbon taxes (a green energy nudge); it was not found when the nudge was unrelated (such as for retirement savings). 

They concluded that mere consideration of a green energy nudge can crowd-out support for more effective, but also more onerous, environmental policies.

Implicative Denial

This perhaps resonates with the work of sociologist Stanley Cohen who identified the principle of Implicative Denial.  This is when we accept the facts but avoid the “psychological, political and moral implications that would conventionally follow”.  He goes on to say this is when we are “quasi-intentionally not following up on the uncomfortable implications” of what we know. 

This is different to ‘Literal denial’ – in this case the active ignoring of the facts or Interpretative denial: where we accept the facts, but reject the meaning, interpreting them in a way that makes life easier for ourselves. So, we might accept climate change, but consider this is something that experts need to address (e.g. through technological solutions) and through that remove responsibility to change the way we individually choose to live.

Polling work does seem to suggest that the most significant issue for climate change is that of Implicative Denial.  Most people accept it is happening but are often not necessarily following through on the implications of this in terms of behaviours – or arguably are accepting less significant changes to lifestyle which then offers a moral licence to carry on more or less as normal. 

On this basis, we need to take care that the introduction of light touch behaviour changes measures such as green nudges do not result in people feeling ‘let off the hook’ from more fundamental changes to tackle climate change.

Designing behaviour change programmes

The job of the behavioural scientist is to identify which interventions can work for what sorts of behaviour change challenges but, in addition, to spell out how these can work alongside each other, so they support rather detract from each other.

This paper suggests that if green nudges are to be deployed, then working to reduce the potential we might have to exaggerate (to ourselves) the impact of the nudge is important to reduce crowding-out of more onerous measures.  

We suggest that this sort of guidance concerning interaction effects is going to be ever more important.  This is because the challenges we face are becoming more complex so we will be looking increasingly closely at the way in which we move from planning individual interventions and start to design behaviour change programmes.  Given a programme will have a range of interventions, then unpicking any interaction effects between different sorts of measures then becomes critical.

The politics of intervention choices

With this in mind, then we surely need to consider that the types of interventions that are introduced are inevitably interpreted as a reflection of the way in which the climate change problem is being conceptualised. 

If the focus is on green nudges, then this may implicitly communicate to people that the onus is on them to change their personal behaviour. If the focus of intervention activity is regulation then this may communicate that the primary responsibility is with governments and brands to take action. 

This is a very live political debate with people such as climatologist Michael Mann suggesting that attention has disproportionately and unreasonably been placed on individuals to take action, rather than on governments and brands.  On this basis, interventions such as green nudges then run the risk of being seen (by some people at least) as reflecting a political / values-based position which may create a backlash if not handled carefully.  

In conclusion

While it is tempting for behavioural scientists to consider that their practice is distinct from politics or values, we cannot ignore that this is not necessarily how the wider public may respond.  Indeed, the furore over ‘behavioural fatigue’ showed the way in which the way in which the issues we are grappling with are conceptualised and that the solutions being proposed do not operate in a politics and values free vacuum. 

Of course we are not suggesting that individual behaviour change is not an important issue to remedy - researcher Michał Czepkiewicz, considers that the concept of carbon footprints has real value for illuminating the vast inequality that exists between low- and high-carbon lifestyles. A recent report by Oxfam found the richest one percent of the world’s population are responsible for more than twice as much carbon pollution as the 3.1 billion people who made up the poorest half of humanity during a critical 25-year period of unprecedented emissions growth.

But there is surely a need for those that are designing behaviour change programmes to be mindful of the way in which others interpret our solutions– and surely even better if we operate in a reflective way,  being thoughtful of the political dimensions of our own practice.   

In last week’s article we discussed the way in which the tough choices that accompany sustainability mean we need to move from offering choices based on what will deliver happiness to those that are delivering meaning.  This means that ‘purpose’ will increasingly come to the fore as a means by which organisations and institutions can engage people to change their behaviour as we transition to Net Zero. 

Arguably, marketing has traditionally been built on the principle of ‘delivering happiness’ – but what are the marketing principles for ‘delivering purpose’?  This is an issue that has generated much discussion with “an awful lot of vitriolic criticism heaped on brand purpose” as Peter Field recently suggested.  Despite this, his research found that 50% of well-executed brand purpose campaigns helped drive customer acquisition, compared to 30% of non-purpose campaigns.

Deploying rituals

What are the ways in which we as behavioural scientists can support the delivery of purpose to drive change?  We make the case for ‘rituals’ as a means to facilitate change for policy makers and marketers but also communities.  The important point about rituals is that they transform even very simple behaviours into expressions of meaning.  The value of the behaviour is more than its instrumental consequential outcome – it is an expression and sharing of meaning for oneself and others. 

Common examples of rituals are the kneeling and bowing of religious prayer which signals commitment to one’s faith; a team’s pregame ritual of setting out equipment in a particular way which then empowers them to together perform at their best .  Another is the rites of a wedding ceremony that signal the bond between the partners.  The reason these behaviours are important is as a result of the meanings they carry and convey.  As Nicholas Hobson and colleagues point out, we can therefore see that these are the two elements of a ritual:

1.   Actions and gestures that are segmented into chunks and arranged in a specific sequence that is adhered to

2.   Symbolic value which gives the behaviour purpose or meaning

The everyday meaning of the term ‘ritual’ is somewhat fluid, but the meaning element implies that a ritual is something that we engage in collectively – it does not only sit in us as an individual but is shared as part of the community we inhabit.  The meaning we give to behaviours is drawn from the culture in which we live and as such others can recognise it.  So many things can be identified here from walks in the park, buying ice-cream while out to a cinema trip on a Friday night. The meaning of them extends beyond the instrumental actions to a wider set of meanings – such as celebrating our intimate relationships, marking the end of the working week and the start of leisure time, or honouring wider friendship groups.

Rituals are therefore ways in which we humans literally embody what is considered a valid order and values of a community. We physically internalize community knowledge, memory and identity.   

Hobson suggests that rituals serve a number of regulatory functions – by this we mean they allow us to operate in a way that offers us balance and harmony.  We can articulate this in a slightly different way for our purposes, by thinking of meaning as being a way that we achieve this, specifically:

·       Social:  Creating a connection to others

·       Emotional:  Shared feelings and emotions

·       Behavioural:  Sharing intentionality towards goals

We review each of these in turn and alongside them consider ways in which these can be used for the purposes of sustainability.

Social rituals

A strong notion in anthropology and sociology is that rituals serve the purpose of regulating our ability to connect with others.  It is seen as way in which our private and public lives are brought together making it easier for us to participate fully in the social world by connecting with other group members, confirming our position in the group, and sharing in social conventions and cultural knowledge. In this way, shared behaviours can create a stronger feeling of connection while simultaneously transmitting social conventions.

We could see that the act of putting out recycling offers just this sort of ritual:  it is not simply the act in itself (which is highly visible for many households at least) but carries meanings of what we consider is appropriate.  Seeing other people doing the same things reinforces our behaviour, and we share a sense of purpose. We are signalling and affirming the importance of making a contribution however uncertain and minor that be in itself.

Emotional rituals

Sociologist Emile Durkheim set out the way that members of a society come together and synchronize their thoughts and behaviours through the use of shared slogans, signs, and movements.   This leads to ‘collective effervescence’ a sense of ‘emotional communion’, which offers participants a means to develop a sense of belonging and shared beliefs.  Surely this is what marketers and advertisers are good at, and can be used to good effect for sustainability.  Advertisers often help people see how their behaviours can make them feel in the future – what we might call ‘emotional prospecting’.   

If we again take the example of recycling, we can use advertising to show people how the collective nature of their activity can feel positive even if the act itself might feel a chore.  For example, we saw the way in which synchronisation of thoughts and feelings associated with the UK’s clap for carers ritual (door stepping clapping in support of front-line workers at the height of the pandemic) created feelings of social belonging and shared beliefs.

Goal based rituals

Humans are the only creatures that are able to share their attention with someone else. When we interact with each other we do not only experience the same event – we know we are experiencing the same event as others. It is this knowledge that we are sharing our attention that changes what we do and what we are able to accomplish in collaboration with others.

This means we can much more easily share common ground, jointly pursuing common goals.  On this basis, rituals help to bring to mind an ideal goal state (e.g. improved performance) and compare the current state with the desired outcome. The obvious example here is sport – there are many team rituals which focus collective behaviour in winning and are often called on in advance of the game taking place or when things are not going so well. 

Again, we can see the way this can easily be used in relation to sustainability:  so much of the challenge is about helping people to consider future states (given the impact of what we do now on the future of the world) and to behave in a collective fashion for positive outcomes.  Rituals can support positive sustainability behaviours by helping people to understand their connections with others, developing a sense of collective action and intent to a positive future (or at least avoiding the otherwise likely catastrophic outcomes).

In conclusion

If, as we have argued, there is a need to move from ‘reward’ to ‘meaning’ to drive behaviour, then we need to unpack the mechanisms needed to deliver this.  Research has shown the effectiveness of purpose-based marketing if it is executed well.  However, it seems to us that there is a need for a stronger conceptual underpinning to determine more clearly what ‘good looks like’. 

Behavioural science offers a tool kit to help understand the nature of the decision challenge – ritual has the components that are needed for delivering behaviour change through shared meanings.  There is more work to be done on how to execute this, but we the opening case has been made.

In addition, we note that our focus has been on marketing communications.  Bearing in mind that shared nature of meaning and rituals more specifically, then we consider that other routes offer real opportunities for brands and public bodies.  To this end, next week we explore the largely under-tapped area of peer support.

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It is difficult to see how we can achieve Net Zero without hard choices and a reduction in the availability or quality of the products and services that we have learnt to know and love.  Enjoying foreign travel, eating meat, driving cars and so on are all things that we may have to learn to forego or at least reduce if we are to meet Net Zero targets. 

There is understandable political sensitivity about this.  It is speculated that a recent government sponsored behavioural science paper on how to achieve Net Zero was published and then rapidly withdrawn due to the discrepancy between the notion that we can transition to net zero without sacrificing the things we love and the requirement in the guidance for “significant behavioural change”.  So just how can we facilitate behaviour change when people clearly enjoy what they currently do so much?

Undesirable choices

Simona Botti has done a great deal of work in the area of undesirable choices – which seems highly relevant for sustainability behaviours.  She found that when we are making choices between undesirable options, we tend to dislike making the choice and have a decline in our happiness as a result.  Also, importantly, when people are making a choice (compared to when consumers have the choice made for them) – they are less satisfied with the outcome. 

A good example is from the area of household goods such as cleaning products.  A brand may have a limited number of options available when selling more environmentally friendly options:

• Premium pricing is used to raise monies to fund brand purpose activities (e.g. tree planting)

• The product formulation / packaging is degraded in some way to have lower environmental impact

• The product ‘activation’ is designed in a way that is more environmentally friendly (e.g. one time purchase refillable bottle / sachets of power for refill)

Arguably none of these choices particularly incentivises consumers relative to their current choice.  And yet each of these involves significant investment for the brand to source materials, set up production lines, manage logistics, develop marketing and so on. 

Similarly for a government body this might be encouraging recycling, composting of food waste, or taking public transport.  None of these maybe particularly appealing to broad swathes of the population. 

Yet brands and public sector bodies are increasingly mandated to make these sorts of changes whilst people are often disinclined to change their behaviour and select the less desirable choices that are offered to them.  So how can this be addressed?

Of course, classical marketing activity can be characterised as using incentivisation or ‘reward-based’ strategies – which would indicate replacing the incentive in some way.  For example, technology can help to offset deterioration in our experience.  This might mean fitting buses with wi-fi thus making them more comfortable.  Or using advances in bio-chemical engineering so that environmentally friendly shampoo has little or no decline in performance.  In many instances this may well result in positive outcomes. Incentives have a role to play and will continue to do so.

Nevertheless, it looks inevitable that there will be downsides of achieving Net Zero.  Surely at some point there has to be a reduction in our happiness.  How do we deal with these hard choices?

How we handle hard choices

We have written previously about the importance of sense, or meaning-making, and the way that this is a fundamental human need that we have.   We can extend this analysis by reviewing a paper by Baumeister and colleagues who make the distinction between happiness and meaningfulness. 

Happiness:  The authors assume that happiness, at its most basic level, reflects a set of natural biological needs to do with survival and reproduction.  All animals have basic motivations that propel them to pursue these needs and it is their satisfaction that results in positive feeling states. Or, of course, when those needs are thwarted, negative feelings arise.

On this basis, ‘affect balance’ depends on whether our basic needs are satisfied; so in common with other animals, our happiness can depend on whether we generally get what we want and need. In other words, an incentive based strategy.

Meaning:  If happiness is natural, Baumeister and colleagues argue that meaningfulness, by contrast, may well depend on culture. All cultures use language, enables us to use and communicate meaning. We have an extraordinary range of concepts that underlie language, which, as we have discussed previously, are rooted in networks of meaning.

These are developed over generations, with each new person learning most of these meanings from the group. Assessing the meaningfulness of our lives therefore uses the purposes, values, and beliefs that imbued in our culture. In this way, meaning is far more linked to our cultural identity than is happiness.

Of course, meaningfulness and happiness are often correlated, they have a great deal in common.  But, Baumeister argues through an ingenious number of experiments, we can see that they are separate mechanisms. 

People can sacrifice personal pleasure in order to participate constructively in the greater wellbeing of society. While we can use money to achieve satisfaction, the core of happiness remains that of having immediate needs and wants satisfied. As such, in their words, ‘The happy person thus resembles an animal with perhaps some added complexity’.

The value of meaning

If we are to effectively find our way to Net Zero, this will mean a real focus on the future, working collectively on how to prevent the sort of catastrophic outcomes that a recent UN report has set out.  But in addition, also using our imagination to find ways in which we can ‘build back better’.

On this basis, a huge advantage of meaningful thought is that it allows us to consider not only the present but past, future, and alongside physically and distant possibilities.  In other words, a ‘purposeful strategy’ means we are only limited by the scope of our imaginations.   

By contrast, happiness, as a subjective state, purely exists in the present moment. At most, the authors argue, happiness may incorporate a degree of our past into the present – but even then most people would not report high life satisfaction on the basis of a good past if they were currently miserable.

We may live meaningful but less happy lives but given this involves working toward a future goal (e.g. avoiding ecological disaster), then the future outcome is much desired despite the less pleasant day-to-day experience. Meaningfulness therefore often involves our lives beyond the present, integrating future and past.

Implications

Having a distinction between happiness and meaningfulness is essential to allow us to think clearly and carefully about sustainability.  It allows us to deal more effectively with the inevitable chasm that will open up in terms of our ability to have our needs met in the way as we have been used to historically.  As the drive to Net Zero bites, ‘incentivisation’ marketing strategy and policy will likely continue to be important but on its own will only take us so far, as it gets ever harder to disguise an increasing array of undesirable choices. 

We argue that a fundamental shift of focus is needed.  Instead of only engaging consumers in terms of incentivisation and happiness, we need marketing and policy that is organised around ‘meaning’ or ‘purpose’.   We need to move from immediate satisfaction of our needs to something where we can consider the greater purpose of our behaviours.  To deliver on this we need to connect behaviours with the purposes, values, and beliefs of our cultural identities. 

This is similar to a topic we have talked about previously - the way many of the challenges that the world faces today need ‘we-thinking’ – where we operate collectively for the long-term communal good. 

But just what are the mechanisms we can draw on as behavioural scientists to help deliver this?  We argue that a key opportunity here is that of ritual - and it is to that we turn next week.

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The UN’s top climate official has given some very stark warnings ahead of the Cop26 climate summit. Patricia Espinosa, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, suggests global security and stability could break down, with migration crises and food shortages bringing conflict and chaos, if countries fail to tackle greenhouse gas emissions. 

In this context, what role do we expect of brands to help address these issues?   This is not an unreasonable question, given Ipsos polling shows 68% of people globally consider that if businesses do not act now to address climate change they will be failing their consumers / employees. This is slightly higher than the related statistic of 65% of people globally considering that if governments do not act now to address climate change they will be failing citizens.

Of course, we expect brands to be effective custodians of our welfare, not just in terms of ensuring that the products and services we consume are well designed and safe but that the way they are produced is responsible.  This clearly encompasses a range of social and environmental factors relating to the sustainability and societal impact of a company.  One leading means of defining and measuring this is ESG:

E:  protecting the environment

S: improving society

G: practicing good governance

In March 2021 Ipsos asked consumers across 28 markets to rank ESG priorities for multinationals. While all three aspects, ‘E’, ‘S’ and ‘G’, are seen as important, ‘improving society’ (S) came out as the top priority, with 41% of the votes globally. ‘Protecting the environment’ (E) followed at 31%, just ahead of ‘practicing good governance’ (G, 28%). 

Given the scale and impact of the Environment challenges we face, it is useful to explore why this does not score more highly in what consumers expect from brands and governments.  Having said that, it is important to note that there are some historical differences here - in 2019 Environmental scored highest in the Ipsos polling.  In addition, there are differences by market – E and S are similar in the UK for example. 

But nevertheless we argue that there are some themes which have meant that Environment can be more of a challenge in terms of peoples’ priorities of concerns which can have knock on effects in terms of shaping positive outcomes.

We deal with these challenges first, before looking at more recent developments related to the way COVID is perhaps influencing things; we argue that COVID means the different ESG strands will increasingly be seen as interlinked and they will collectively rise rapidly up our collective list of priorities.

Possible reasons why Environment concerns are not so much higher

Given the catastrophic warnings that we are hearing, we need to understand why Environment is not playing a much bigger role in peoples concerns. Here we do not seek to set out an exhaustive listing of this complex area but rather seek to identify a number of broad themes.

Human relationship with nature: There is a long tradition of considering human beings as fundamentally different from other forms of life.  Aristotle suggested humans possess a rational soul or intellect and it is this alone that has access to ‘less corruptible sphere’ and has affinity with the divine ‘unmoved mover’. 

Two thousand years later Descartes continued this hierarchical continuum of living beings with the ‘Great chain of being’ – polarising the world into a dichotomy between mechanical unthinking matter (minerals, plants, animals, human body) and the pure thinking mind (exclusive to humans and God).   

With this tradition in mind, it is perhaps little wonder that we are accustomed to thinking of nature as something quite separate and less important than ourselves. 

Sacred values: We hold some values as ‘sacred’:  by this we mean something that people really care about, and are unwilling to trade or negotiate.    What we choose to consider sacred and what is negotiated is, of course, a matter of debate but as we have previously discussed, it is these values rather than outcomes of our actions that often seem to be shaping debate.   

Dan Kahan points to the way in which our disagreements or what we choose to focus on is due less to people failing to understand the science, or even that they lack relevant information. Instead disagreement is generated from the way “people endorse whichever position reinforces their connection to others with whom they share important ties”.  We can consider these positions as reflecting a primacy of ‘sacred values’ shaping our behaviour and attitudes rather than a consideration of the outcomes of our behaviour.

In other words, climate change is seen as something that is associated with a particular set of political concerns rather than something that requires us all to be engaged. Set against social justice (which may have a range of perspectives included within it) then we can see how concern about Environment is in danger of being supported by a subsegment of the population rather than being given broader importance in peoples minds.

Misinformation challenges: Whilst there has historically been a great deal of misinformation concerning the denial of the reality of the human causation of climate change, a recent paper by sustainability researcher, William Lamb and co-authors suggests this has been replaced by more subtle discourses that accept the existence of climate change, but justify inaction or inadequate efforts. 

Alongside his co-authors he points to the underlying logic used to discourage climate action, revolving around four key questions: (1) Is it our responsibility to take actions? (2) Are transformative changes necessary? (3) Is it desirable to mitigate climate change, given the costs? (4) Is it still possible to mitigate climate change? 

While each of these build on reasonable concerns and fears, they can readily become arguments for delay when they ‘misrepresent rather than clarify, raise adversity rather than consensus or imply that taking action is an impossible challenge’.  As such we can see how this can reduce the focus on Environment in peoples minds.

The connected nature of ESG

We can see the case for the way in which Environment does not necessarily always have primacy (relative to Social and Governance) in the way in which we hold governments and companies to account. And to reiterate, there are inevitably other reasons for this but we see these as offering some ‘meta’ explanatory value. 

There is, however, a case to be made that COVID is changing the way in which we think about and prioritise the different elements of ESG. has created an environment where more people than ever before are re-evaluating their lives, ‘switching jobs, moving house and even breaking up’.  Perhaps we can see the way in which the new landscape has created a window where we are seeing the world afresh.  Albert Camus famously pointed out that plagues can make us feel that “we are strangers in our own country”, looking at things anew.

When people are rethinking how they live their lives and starting to question the way they live then we start to be uncomfortable with any disconnect between our values and our behaviour.  During COVID we could see more clearly the linkage between many of the values that we hold sacred and our behaviours - finding these were in conflict. 

More specifically, over the course of COVID we have seen more clearly the way in which injustice has played out, showing us in a very clear way the fault-lines in societies as the less powerful have suffered most.  At many points where there is a contradiction between our beliefs and behaviours of the time we can choose not to look too closely: COVID made that much harder for Social injustice.

Arguably this has focused us ever more on the Social rather than Environment aspects of ESG.  And the distinction between the different elements of ESG is of course artificial:  there are huge Social costs to climate change, just as there are huge Governance implications.  People simply need support to see these linkages and understand the issues.

To this end, COVID has perhaps had another impact on how we see ourselves as humans – in a very salient way we can see that we are very much part of nature, inhabiting bodies that are vulnerable to the wider (viral) eco-system we inhabit. 

COVID has created a rupture, making a window where surely there is an opportunity to help people to make these connections more clearly and see how care for the environment is not something that is limited to a particular value system or disconnected from Social justice and good Governance. 

We have a point of disruption of our experience and beliefs that means we can surely help people in the way they look at the Environment, to more effectively manage misinformation and understand the consequential impact of not collectively participating in sustainability behaviours.

Conclusions

Of course, there is no trade-off between the different elements of ESG – Ipsos research shows time and again the way they are inter-related.  People expect leadership from brands and governments on each of these elements. 

And not only that but people are seeing the linkages between them: indeed, 65% of people globally feel the pandemic is in some way linked to our mistreatment of the planet. This is an argument for the emergence of ‘planetary health’, the notion that human health and wellbeing is intrinsically linked to the health of the environment. 

Against this backdrop, there is a need for brands and government bodies to show leadership in helping people to navigate these spaces and to see how their behaviours are part of a wider opportunity for change.

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Making widescale societal change happen for sustainability can seem like a monumental task that defeats the best of intentions.  What difference does taking out my recycling or choosing the more expensive eco-fabric care make when the instrumental impact is a drop in the ocean?  It seems this is often a barrier for making change, understanding how our individual behaviour can make a difference to the big picture.  This is the case for all social change movements, not just sustainability, so it seems that the psychology of how social movements form and change behaviour can surely apply to our everyday consumer micro-behaviours of our daily lives.

Rewards to shape behaviour

One of the ways in which change is often talked about in relation to consumer behaviour and sustainability is the notion of reward. This is designing the consumer environment in a way that can secure that there are ‘pay-offs’ for the more sustainable choices.  Or at the very least trying to ensure there is no detriment to the performance of our more environmentally purchase. 

So we want to make certain that when buying a deodorant, that is made of natural materials, or when choosing a chocolate cake with ethically sourced ingredients, we do not have a significant decline in performance or quality compared to our usual, non-sustainable choices.  At the very least, there can be a pay-off in terms of a ‘warm glow’ for ‘doing the right thing’. This often informs marketing strategy and for good reason - there is much to support this approach.

But is a reward based strategy enough to deliver the scale of change that we need?  Perhaps not, we might think when we turn to Martin Seligman  and colleagues who argue that much of our behaviour is a function of the way we navigate the future, rather than the results of learned conditioning of rewards and punishments.  They consider we are more effective if we do not live simply in the present but continuously model what might lie ahead and proactively seek information, allocate mental resources, evaluate alternatives, and select action.  We are then using past experience as information, to help form and evaluate a range of future possibilities, rather than it simply determining our behaviour.

So while reward based marketing strategies are necessary, we consider there is a case to be made that they may well not be sufficient on their own to shape the collective action needed for widespread more fundamental change to take place.

The psychology of social change

As such, one of the areas that we argue deserves a more attention is the psychology of social change:  identifying the mechanisms that underpin making societal change happen.  This has long been an area of great interest for social science, although possibly more for sociology than psychology.  While there is a great deal written about the impact of ‘macro’ processes (e.g. technology change, changes in living conditions) much less has been written on micro- behaviours – what are the ways in which individuals can create social change?  A recent issue of Current Opinion in Psychology explored this theme in a number of papers: the point made by editor Seamus Power, is that revolutions are not always solely fought in the streets, but, also, at the level of practices and ideas.  Our micro-behaviours can generate revolutionary ideas and behaviours leading to widespread change.

This is consistent with the idea of ‘prefiguration’ a term first coined by political scientist Carl Boggs, who described it as the attempt to create change ‘here and now’ through the construction of ‘local and collective structures that anticipate the future (see this paper for more discussion).  Small-scale spaces where people act in the way they ‘want the world to be’ rather than ‘how it is now’ can be central to societal transitions, offering new ideas and showing us all new possibilities for living.   

Of course, as we well know, the success of these will depend on the surrounding social, political, economic and cultural context being open to encompassing these new ways of operating.  There have been many false dawns. But perhaps now, with the existential crisis of climate change getting ever more salient and COVID fundamentally disrupting our everyday lives, we are at a point of disruption where our minds are collectively ‘unfrozen’ and we can accept different ways of being.

This seems like a recipe for the way in which small groups of socially engaged people may seek to effect change.  But how is this relevant to the general population that may not see themselves at a vanguard of creating new and innovative ways of living?  The challenge is how we translate this to have meaning for the majority of the population in our everyday behaviours.

Meaning making to drive change

To understand how we can do this, we return to the issue of meaning making.   Nick Chater and George Lowenstein consider that the existence of a ‘drive for sense-making’, (as they call it) is analogous to better known drives such as hunger, thirst and sex.   Sense making seems ever more important challenge to get right, given that the world we now live in is vast, interconnected and complicated.  It is hard to match up the complex systems shaping our lives and the explanations we as individuals have available (see Peter Knight for more on this).  We see this issue reflected in Ipsos polling, people are confused about how to navigate their everyday sustainability behaviours – understanding what matters, what difference it makes and why.

Supporting people to place their behaviours into a wider network of meaning and sense is hugely motivating for people.  This meaning is all about prospecting the future, seeing how we can be part of something bigger than ourselves, shaping a future that we would wish for ourselves and others.  This meaning making is not, of course limited to outcomes that many (but perhaps not all of us) may all sign up to – this thinking can also help us to explain Brexit, the rise of Trump and the general increase in nationalism globally (regardless of your position on these topics). 

The point is, the meaning that people attribute to their behaviours, and being part of something bigger than themselves as a result, is hugely motivating and we can see the way in which this underpins social change. Our behaviours doesn’t operate in isolation to impact only us but will impact those around us as well.

Hive mind and social change

Meaning making is not necessarily a purely individual activity according to Seligman et al who talk about the need for a shared social discourse to construct a picture of how things can or should be, with people reasoning and planning together. We consult and discuss to work out what to expect, or feel, or seek under a variety of different contingencies - we know this from our everyday lived experiences. 

This chimes with Philip Fernbach and Steve Sloman who talk about the way we live in a community of knowledge and beliefs – things are not worked out individually but collectively, between us.  They cite the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who in the early twentieth century developed the notion that the mind is a social entity. He argued it is not our individual capabilities that distinguishes human beings. Instead, humans can learn via other people and culture and people collaborate: we engage with others in collective activities. We inhabit hive minds in a way that can be hard for us to see.

What does this mean for making change happen?

This all points to brands and government bodies assisting in the collective working out, being part of a conversation of ways to construct a future.  This requires supporting prefigurative activities, helping people to be creative in ways to live (see this for examples), showing people the way in which their micro-decisions are part of a bigger picture of change.  And as these new ways of living form, finding ways to effectively communicate a picture of how life can be, that connects with the general public’s very real and immediate attitudes, desires, and motivations. 

Given the very social nature of sense-making, a lot of this sense making is of course taking place online.  Not engaging in the online debates creates information vacuums that can lead people down slippery slopes of misinformation.  There is a need for participation by brands and other institutions in the collective discussion, operating in a pre-figurative way themselves to exploring to understand how best to work alongside people to join the dots between their everyday choices and meaningful, global scale change.

If we only focus on how to ‘reward’ people for their participation, trying hard to ensure that the downsides are not too significant, then we lose the opportunity to bring people into shared communities of understanding, meaning and identity.  It is through this that there are surely real opportunities for energising and activating behaviour - much needed for bringing people along a sustainability journey that leads to widespread social change.

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As behavioural scientists we often need to dig into topics that do not immediately sound like behaviour.  Topics such as trust, attention, and engagement.  What, we may ask, might these have to do with behavioural science?  They seem a little too abstract and high level for the sort of attention that is in the purview of behavioural science. However, we argue that these are essential ingredients to understand behaviour and to develop effective means of influencing outcomes. 

To explore this, we will look at the subject of engagement, a topic that comes up on a very regular basis, particularly in the case of sustainability.  Much is discussed about the need for engagement on the issue of sustainability, but it is not always clear why we need it and what this means. 

Why we need engagement

First let’s set out the case the why we need engagement.  Lorraine Whitmarsh has aptly made the point that it is over-ambitious to think we can simply legislate or nudge people into sustainable lifestyles.  Not only are there are too many individual behaviours underpinning sustainability to address on a case-by-case basis, but, she argues, if the public informed and involved – in other terms engaged - then we can effect much greater change.

Another reason for encouraging engagement is that unless people have thought through their behaviours then there is a danger that we find rebound effects.  For example, there is some evidence that people who have been defaulted into an auto enrolment retirement savings, whilst positive in intention, meant that they started to borrow more money for car loans and first mortgages – leading to an overall adverse effect on the household financial balance sheet.  Participation without engagement therefore comes with dangers.

Defining terms

Before we get too much further, we also need to unpick what we mean by ‘engagement’ as all too often these words can lose their meaning as they get tossed about to serve various purposes.  The term is often overly simplified to mean time spent on a digital apps, with all the controversy that accompanies that. 

Contrary to this definition of engagement that focuses on the medium rather than what an individual is doing with it, we, instead, think of engagement as reflecting a way of processing and interacting with information; a process that reflects deliberation and reflection – which we can identify through a range of categories of ‘engagement behaviours’ – such as researching and learning about a topic, asking questions, talking to others about it. Under these broad categories of engagement behaviours, there will be a range of specific behaviours that we may be interested in – at the one end it might be going to a website and reading material, at the other end it might be joining a community group. We are necessarily flexible in how we define the resulting behaviours.

Of course, we need to convert the engagement behaviours into the outcomes we are seeking, and tools such as the Trans Theoretical Model or a Theory of Change can help to identify the cascading influence that engagement behaviours could have on the outcome.  All too often it is tempting to focus only on upstream engagement behaviours – partly because it is easier to focus on encouraging  someone to look at something than to engage in a complex set of actions.  But partly because it is easier to measure the impact of intervention activities on these sorts of ‘upstream’ behaviours, rather than the more important ‘down-stream’ end behaviour. 

While measurement of engagement behaviours is important, we must not fool ourselves that it is the end goal.  Indeed, there is evidence that upstream ‘knowledge acquisition’ can result in very little impact on subsequent behaviour.

Building engagement

An important part of engagement, in our experience, is that of sense making.  We live in an increasingly complex world where people are expected to personally take ever more responsibility for their education, financial wellbeing, health and, of course, working out how to live in a sustainable manner. At the same time, there is a great deal of information available, much of which can be conflicting and, as we well know, misleading (or misinformation).  Helping people to make sense of themselves and their lives so they can navigate this sea of information is critical. 

This is more than simply giving people information – we know that this is not enough – we need to be able to make sense of things to be effective decision makers and participate fully in sustainable living.  Nick Chater and George Lowenstein consider that our ‘drive for sense-making’ is analogous to better known drives such as hunger, thirst and sex.  We get real satisfaction from being able to tell a coherent story about our life, but also the satisfaction of gaining new information that leads to a refinement of that story

We find that schema management is important here:  by this we mean that when we seek out new information, it is fitted into existing schema; if new information doesn’t fit in, there is a possibility that that information is overlooked. So we need to share information in a way that is timely, relevant and experiential so that we can effectively guide people to fit conflicting information with their existing schemas.  Essentially to make sense of things to form beliefs about the world and ourselves. This fits a wider agenda that we seek to live meaningful lives, participating in worthwhile activities that are bigger than our immediate day to day concerns.  How we make create this meaning, and how we help others to do this, is a social activity that governments, public bodies and brands can and should all participate in.  Indeed, failure to do so can result in information vacuums and the subsequent danger of sliding into conspiracy theories (which can themselves be seen as a form of sense making).

So what do we need to do?

Engagement is a critical ingredient for effective participation in many behaviours such as sustainability.  If we obtain participation without engagement, we have seen there is a danger that we get rebound effects.  But in addition, if we simply focus on engagement without thinking through how to translate this into behaviour, then we have clearly not done our job well enough.

We need to think of the behaviour we are hoping to shape to be a process.  First we need to grab peoples’ attention, to disrupt their more intuitive processes that might cause them to ignore the issue.  Second, once we have their attention, we are then seeking to encourage engagement by connecting with them in a way that aligns with the way they make sense of the world but also at a point when they will be receptive to it (e.g. when making a significant new purchase). In doing so, must reflect how people engage with new information, which is through asking a series of questions about the new information.

• Do others in my environment believe this claim? Checking for social consensus. People are influenced by how often they themselves have heard the claim. Familiarity gives the impression that a view is widely held.

• Is there a lot of evidence for the claim? Some will take a speedier route to a judgment, based on how easy it is to recall pieces of evidence from their own memory – which means simple and memorable claims will trump more complex views of reality. 

• Does this claim match what I already believe?  When something is not consistent with what we already think we stumble, whereas new knowledge that fits with our current thinking is easy to agree with (also known as confirmation bias). 

• Does the claim tell a good story? When details are presented in a coherent story-based format, people are more likely to believe them. 

• Does the claim come from a credible source?  A source can be perceived as credible based on expertise, past behaviour or perceived motive – or, at its simplest, how a person feels about the source (affect heuristic).

Third, we then need to clearly show how this sense making can be activated into behaviour. Work by people like economist Antoinette Schoar is useful here, teaching small enterprises in the Dominican Republic simple rules of thumb to manage their finances, identified by studying successful entrepreneurs.  Behaviour change frameworks help us at the stage to make the transition to successful outcomes, overcoming the wide range of possible barriers between intention and action.

Conclusions

Done poorly, simple information provision can result in poor ‘downstream’ outcomes – a meta-analysis in financial literacy found that provision of financial literacy education resulted in a rather disappointing 0.1% change in downstream behaviours.  However, there is also other evidence that suggests provision of accurate information which engages with people’s beliefs and understanding, in this case about climate change, look to be effective in the long run.

The overarching point is that we need to meet people on their own terms, in the contexts where they enact behaviours, and reflecting the ways that people make sense of and integrate new information – rather than talking in abstract, non-relatable manner.  Once this sense-making is started, we can then help people to then enact the behaviour using more familiar behaviour change approaches. 

We can see how, in a very tangible way, behavioural science is much more a verb than a noun.  We operate in a very dynamic way, picking apart the process or system that results in behaviour.

Our individual acts of sustainability can feel pointless – after all, what difference does it really make for us to recycle, walk rather than drive, buy the environmentally friendly option and so on when it seems a drop in the ocean?  Of course, just as with voting, we conceptually understand that it is us as individuals acting in tandem with other people that makes the difference, but nevertheless it is hard to retain that sense of collective action.  And while it can seem as if we are being guided on how to contribute less to the challenge of climate crisis, it may not feel as if we are participating in actually fixing it, surely a much less motivating proposition. 

One of the ways to address this is to consider how individual acts are more than the behaviour itself – they have meaning for the individual and those around them.  By putting out the recycling, for example, we are not simply making a contribution but signalling who we are and what we consider to be important.  This signal doesn’t operate in isolation to impact only us, of course, but rather can impact those around us as well. Moreover, these acts of behaviour are imbued with meaning, based on the values we live by and the identity of ourselves that we hold. 

We can see the way this plays out more tangibly with mask wearing. which has become laden with meaning (for some groups / regions at least):  not only is it something that we may or may not do for practical reasons (protecting others), but it is increasingly expressing the values and identity that we hold:

• Not wearing a mask may be seen as identifying us as a libertarian most concerned about individual rights and freedom and expression

• Wearing a mask one may be seen as identifying us on the more communitarian, referencing the connected nature of our lives and concerned to do right by others

Indeed, research in this area suggests that face masks can be seen as linked to a wide range of cultural and socio-political considerations. So we can see the way in which behaviour does not exist in a vacuum –we are sense makers of our own and others behaviour, placing it in a wider network of meaning. 

Dan Kahan talks about this in his work on cultural cognition – he sets out the way in which the cultural values we hold defines our social identities - which in turn shape our beliefs about disputed matters of fact (e.g., whether humans are responsible for climate change; whether the death penalty prevents murder). He shows how this helps to explain why groups with different cultural outlooks (such as left or right of centre political orientation) disagree about important societal issues. 

On this basis disagreement is not due to people failing to understand the science or even that they lack relevant information. Instead, according to Kahan, disagreement is generated from the way “people endorse whichever position reinforces their connection to others with whom they share important ties”.

That we seek meaning is something that Timothy Wilson has long explored:  how we make sense, or meaning, out of a situation shapes our behaviour.  This desire for sense making revolves around:

• The need to understand — make sense of our situation in a way that allows us to predict behaviour and guide our own action

• The need for self-integrity — view ourselves positively and believe we are sufficient, ethical, competent and coherent

• The need for belonging — feel connected to others, accepted and valued.

At face value this may seem quite a radical way of looking at behaviour.  Much is written about the way we can ‘nudge’ people into particular behaviours, changing the environmental cues to take advantage of the non-conscious mechanisms (or heuristics).   While we do not contest that this has an important role, we should note that Kahneman himself makes the point that nudges are designed to help people reach their desired outcomes.  The part that comes before this, which is where Wilson’s approach is helpful, is how can we help people make sense of their environment in order to determine what they want to do and determine the desired outcomes they want?

Wilson and his team have developed ‘WISE interventions’, techniques for changing meaning by changing people’s understanding, sense of personal competence and sense of connection to others:

• Direct labelling — provide a positive label that identifies what might otherwise be an ambiguous aspect of themselves: “this test is meant to help me, the teacher, assess my teaching style” (as opposed to assess the students’ performance).

• Prompting new meaning — provide the basis for a new way of thinking about the self, a situation, or others: asking questions, altering a situation, or providing new information.

• Increasing commitment through action — create situations that encourage people to act in accordance with a new idea, thereby reinforcing that idea.

• Active reflection exercise — structured exercises, that help people understand their personal experiences from a new perspective.

Looking at behaviour in this way, and deploying interventions that help us make sense of the world is surely what is needed right now.  We live at a time of immense social, political, technological and environmental disruption – it can be hard to make sense of the world and our own behaviours within it.  With this in mind, we can see that putting out my recycling may be less about the factual, consequential nature of what I do (the individual act in itself makes little or no difference) and more about the meaning and sense I make of this and of myself.  By doing this I am more deeply encoding the recycling behaviour with meaning, which helps to reinforce to myself and others that I am a person that cares about the world.  In turn, this meaning will engender further acts to align with this identity, and more opportunities to signal this identity to others. 

Conclusions

Supporting people to make sense of the world and how to live sustainably requires us to rethink the way we engage with people.  This is an opportunity for governments, with initiatives such as Citizens Assemblies allowing policy makers to understand the challenges people face in making sense of the world and ways in which policy makers can help connect with peoples very real concerns and understandings.  But brands also have a role to play – may are struggling to understand why consumers are not choosing their sustainable options that they have invested in bringing to market.  It seems as if ‘brand purpose’ activities could be directed to engaging with people, working in partnership to make sense of how to participate in this changing world and working together to drive positive outcomes.

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