How Psychology Can Help the Planet Stay Cool
"I’m not convinced it’s as bad as the experts make out... It’s everyone else’s fault... Even if I turn off my air conditioner, it will make no difference." The list of reasons for not acting to combat global warming goes on and on.
This month, American Psychological Association (APA) released a report highlighting these and other psychological barriers standing in the way of action. But don’t despair. The report also points to strategies that could be used to convince us to play our part. Sourced from psychological experiments, we review tricks that could be used by companies or organisations to encourage climate-friendly behaviour. In addition, psychologist Mark van Vugt of the Free University of Amsterdam describes the elements of human nature that push us to act unselfishly.
Appropriate guides
As advertisers of consumer products well know, different groups of people may have quite distinct interests and motivations, and messages that seek to change behaviour need to be tailored to take these into account. "You have to target the marketing to a particular sector of the population," says Robert Gifford of the University of Victoria, another of the report’s authors.
The wealthy young, for instance, tend to be diet conscious, and this could be used to steer them away from foods like cheeseburgers--one of the most climate-unfriendly meals around because of the energy it takes to raise cattle. So when trying to convince them to give up that carbon-intensive beef pie, better to stress health benefits than the global climate.
Though conservative authorities have been known to attack such efforts, characterising them as mind control, experiments indicate that people are willing to be persuaded. "From participants in our experiments, we’ve never heard a negative feedback," says Wesley Schultz of California State University. In fact, according to John Petersen of Oberlin College, we are used to far worse. "Compared to the overwhelming number of advertising, it seems milder than anything I experience in my daily life," he says.
Good neighbours
Deep down, most of us want to fit in with the crowd, and psychologists are exploiting this urge to encourage environmentally friendly behaviour.
Researchers led by Wesley Schultz at California State University and Jessica Nolan, now at the University of Scranton, have found that people will cut their electricity usage if told that their neighbours use less than they do.
In one experiment, the researchers left information with households in San Marcos asking them to use fans rather than air conditioners at night, turn off lights and take shorter showers. Some messages simply stressed energy conservation, some talked about future generations, while others emphasised the financial savings. But it was the flyers(传单) that asked residents to join with their neighbours in saving energy that were most effective in cutting electricity consumption.
In another study, the researchers told households what others in their neighbourhood used on average. High users cut their consumption in response, but low users increased theirs. The problem disappeared if the messages were reinforced with sad or smiling faces. The smiles received by the residents who were already saving energy provided sufficient encouragement for them to keep doing so.
Information economy
Most people seem to conserve energy if provided with real-time feedback on how much they are using. But feedback can be too immediate.
For instance, Janet Swim has a General Motors car that shows her mileage(里程) per gallon each time she accelerates. It’s just not very useful, she argues, because it’s hard to place that momentary piece of feedback in the context of her overall driving behaviour and fuel efficiency.
In contrast, the Toyota Prius display shows mileage per gallon over 5-minute intervals for the previous halfhour. With that contextual information, people can experiment with different driving styles to see how they affect mileage, and even compete with themselves to improve over time. The 2010 Honda Insight goes one better, flashing up an image of a prize to reward economical driving.
The benefits of feedback are not restricted to car gadgets(小装置). Studies show that devices that display domestic energy usage produce savings of between 5 and 12 percent.
Here and now
People have to be persuaded to act on climate change even though the benefit won’t be felt for decades. Research by David Hardisty and Elke Weber of Columbia University suggests ways to achieve this.
Hardisty and Weber have found that people respond in exactly the same way to decisions involving future environmental gains and losses as they do when financial decisions. This allows psychologists’ knowledge of how to control financial decision- to be brought into play.
For instance, schemes that give people a cash payment in advance for insulating(使隔热) their home will work better than those promising long-term savings, even if the people receiving cash end up paying a little more in the long run.
And because we are generally more worried about future losses than we are impressed by future gains, messages are more effective if framed to warn people that they will lose $500 over 10 years if they don’t follow a particular course of action to limit climate change than if they are told they’ll be $500 better off if they do take action.
Social networks
As social animals, we like to interact with others and take inspiration from their actions. Psychologists are working out how to exploit this to spread behaviours that will help limit climate change. "My sense is that social networks are going to be important," says Swim.
Allowing people to document successes in saving energy on their Facebook pages could drive change among their friends, and the Oberlin team is considering integrating this into its residence experiment.
Tawanna Dillahunt and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, think such opportunities presented by Facebook can be combined with our liking for animals. Inspired by the attachment that people can develop towards Tamagotchi virtual pets, the team is testing the compelling power of a "virtual polar bear" standing on a sheet of floating ice that grows bigger as people adopt environmentally friendly behaviours such as taking shorter showers. Initial results suggest the polar bear has pull.
How Psychology Can Help the Planet Stay CoolAppropriate guidesGood neighboursInformation economyHere and nowSocial networksIt’s better to persuade the wealthy young out of carbon-intensive food by _______.