Green Decisions: Sustainability & Behavioral Science
Interview with Erik Thulin
Erik leads research and development at the Center for Behavior and the Environment at the environmental non-profit Rare. His work focuses on conducting the research necessary for taking behavioral science out of the lab to driving change in the field. He received his PhD in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania studying social norm change.
Habit Weekly (HW): Can you share an example of a successful sustainability initiative that effectively leveraged insights from behavioral science to drive widespread change?
Erik Thulin (ET): One of my favorites at the moment is Solarize, a Department of Energy funded initiative that has taken off across the country. Solarize leverages community campaigns to drive the adoption of rooftop solar. They do a ton of things right. They reduce ambiguity by having experts from the community pre-vet installers. They reduce financial burdens by leveraging their group purchasing to secure discounts. But perhaps most impactfully, they both use and shift solar norms through the highlighting of ambassadors within the community who already have solar to change social expectations around the entire process. Perhaps just as relevant as what they do do is what they don’t. Critically, they don’t assume you can just nudge someone into spending tens of thousands of dollars. Instead, they leverage a far more intensive program leveraging behavioral insights to drive change.
The question simply comes down to what actions have the largest impact including the largest ripples.
How do you approach the challenge of balancing the promotion of sustainable behaviors at the individual level with the need for systemic changes in industries and policies?
ET: I think this question represents a dichotomy in thinking which often undermines the opportunity for change. Systems are emergent constructs from the individuals within them. If we want to understand the impact of changing some element of that system (like the behavior of a given actor), we need to consider the impacts across the entire system.
Is putting solar on your roof an individual action? It impacts the probability of those around you installing solar, influences the grid mix in your local area, and influences public utility revenue. Is choosing to purchase a vegetarian meal rather than a meat meal an individual action? To believe so would require some fundamental rejection of how we conceptualize supply and demand. Is voting? Petitioning your elected representative? Protesting? All of these are actions that actors within a system can take which have ripple effects throughout the system. So to me, there isn’t any such tension. The question simply comes down to what actions have the largest impact including the largest ripples.
What are the key psychological barriers that prevent individuals from adopting sustainable behaviors, and what strategies might overcome these obstacles?
ET: I think we too often try to cleave behavioral challenges by domain. Before I joined the Center for Behavior & the Environment, I had never worked on sustainability. That same holds for most of the scientists at the Center. Two things are true about environmental behavioral challenges: (1) they aren’t fundamentally different from challenges in other domains, and (2) within the environmental domain, there are radical differences in the psychological barriers to adopting different behaviors.
We see a lot of challenges around efficacy, in terms of self-efficacy, collective efficacy, and outcome-efficacy.
But after all that throat-clearing, I will highlight a few psychological barriers we see come up frequently, often together with one another. We see a lot of challenges around efficacy, in terms of self-efficacy (belief you can perform the behavior), collective efficacy (collective belief that the group can perform the behavior), and outcome-efficacy (belief that the behavior will have the intended impact). We see challenges in social norms, both people believing that others aren’t engaging in the target behaviors and that others don’t think they should. Importantly, these are often pluralistic ignorance situations, where far more people think these behaviors should be adopted than others expect. Finally, a lot of driving adoption is both making it both feel easier to do as well as making it actually easier to do. Part of good design is recognizing that the solutions to those barriers is often heavily context and behavior specific so I hesitate to point too much attention to any given solution.
What are the common hurdles businesses face when trying to implement behavioral science-informed sustainability strategies, and how can they more effectively engage customers and employees?
ET: I don’t have a lot of faith in a broad push from businesses to implement behavioral science-informed sustainability strategies, because I think their barriers to doing so are structural. The incentives in a business context are rarely aligned with high-impact behavior change, which often means consuming less of their product. I would note that consumers are often those with the power in this dynamic, as it is their preferences that businesses are strategizing to address. In many firms, sustainability is literally the purview of the marketing team. Recognizing that dynamic, sustainability teams are often in the position of needing to justify green positioning in terms of brand equity.
Consumers are often those with the power, as it is their preferences that businesses are strategizing to address.
While plenty of one-off counter examples exist, I don’t think we should be looking to businesses to be leaders in promoting effective sustainability strategies beyond those that directly benefit their own bottom line such as internal efficiencies. Large-scale change in that context is going to come from changes in consumer demand and the regulatory environment.
Can you discuss how cultural differences shape attitudes and behaviors towards sustainability, and how might we use this understanding to promote change?
ET: There are a few different angles to think about this. Some of your readers may be familiar with the Environmental Kuznets Curve (see figure below), which documents the broad finding that as incomes rise, so does environmental sustainability concerns. The most common explanation for this phenomenon is that caring about things like sustainability is something you have the luxury of once your basic needs are met. While there is some broad truth to this, it neglects the degree to which many people in low-income contexts rely heavily on the environment to meet those same basic needs, Rare’s work in coastal fisheries being an excellent example.
However, I think the framing of cultural differences in sustainability can actually divert us from the cultural differences that are actually most important to driving high-impact environmental behaviors. That is because how the behavior itself is framed may in fact be where the cultural discrepancies lie. Most of the fishers we work with in small-scale coastal fisheries see overfishing as not primarily an environmental challenge but as a challenge to their livelihoods and way of life. A rural Texan with solar panels may not see those panels as reducing greenhouse gas emissions but as a way to express her independence. To think cross-culturally (whether that is between or within countries), one of the most important things to do is often to recognize that while the environmental benefits may seem salient to you as the designer, they may not be the salient factor for those you hope to influence.
I see a future where far more behavioral science based interventions are intensive community based approaches applying a layered strategy addressing multiple barriers simultaneously.
Looking ahead, what emerging trends or developments in behavioral science do you foresee having the most significant impact on sustainability efforts?
ET: I have two thoughts, one in the short term one the long term. I am heartened by the reckoning applied bevhavioral science is experiencing at the moment, in which the field as a whole is coming to terms with (1) while nudge style interventions may have high ROI, they tend not to have large effects particularly when targeting our greatest challenges like shifting livelihoods and (2) behavioral and social sciences have much more to offer than only the minimalism of nudging. I see a future where far more behavioral science based interventions are intensive community based approaches applying a layered strategy addressing multiple barriers simultaneously. These strategies won’t be as cheap, as easy to evaluate, or as simple to implement as the nudges of the past decade and a half, but I have hope for them truely delivering on the transformative promise of behavioral science for behaviors that matter.
My second thought is much more speculative but also I think has even more potential. The advancements in the Cultural Evolution (CE) space over the past twenty years or so have been really underappreciated by those hoping to translate science into practice. I think CE has the potential for transforming behavioral science from a laundry list of biases into a unified theory, one which is already giving insights highly applicable to practitioners. A focus area for my team over the next few years will be translating some of these insights, such as those on optimal targeting within a social network and social norm diffusion and stabilization, into applied tools for the field.
If you had the power to instill one sustainable habit in every person overnight, what would it be and why?
ET: Many sustainability focused behaviors are most appropriate for some subset of the population, so that wouldn’t be applicable for everyone. That being said, one which breaks that mold is sustainable diets, particularly reducing our meat consumption. Ours and others research finds that it is on of the most commonly underappreciated direct impacts we can have, despite it being often both healthier and cheaper than the status-quo.
I will take the liberty of adding a second repeated behavior accessible to everyone in a democracy, which is to regularly engage with your elected representatives on the environmental issues that matter to you. Politicians keep a surprisingly close watch on the support or backlash they receive from their constituencies, yet they receive very little input on the vast majority of high-impact legislation. If you live in the United States, you might consider downloading the Climate Action Now app, which will give you an easy path to engaging your elected representatives tailored to your specific geography and the opportunities where your voice could have the most impact.
Bonus Question: There are a lot of films and TV shows trying to depict the consequences of neglecting our climate. Do you have a favorite one?
I am excited to see climate coming into focus on screen! To take this in a perhaps surprising direction, I think a climate film worth watching and sharing is the 2022 How to Blow Up a Pipeline. First off, it was a pretty well-made film (as of right now, it has a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes). But second, the social and behavioral science angle on its impact is both nuanced and interesting. Radical action does not necessarily engender support for that radical action. In fact, there have been many instances where it does the opposite. But the more holistic social science perspective requires you to zoom out a bit to see how this sort of depiction can affect a broader set of views and behaviors. Through this broader lens, this sort of depiction has the opportunity for impact through what researchers have called the Radical Flank Effect, where observing radical action can increase support for moderate approaches. For example, previous research has found that radical campaigns by organizations like Just Stop Oil have increased support for more moderate organizations and policies, likely by shifting the discourse window. I think that narrative fiction has an incredible opportunity to establish that window, and I look forward to more depictions that seize that opportunity to drive support for highly impact action.
Thank you so much Eric, for sharing your insights. If you want to connect with Eric, you can find him on LinkedIn.
