The Observatory: The Key to Sustainability is Human Behavior
The Observatory is a weekly series that brings together students, alumni, and professionals associated with OSU Battelle Center to write about topics that are relevant to the mission of our center. Our guest writer this week is Jamie Allen, a first year doctoral student in the School of Environment and Natural Resources within the Environmental Social Sciences Specialization. She is interested in interventions to promote pro-environmental behavior, and the psychological processes of decision-making. She is also in the EmPOWERment traineeship program to apply her field to finding sustainable energy solutions, and to gain an interdisciplinary understanding of the topic.
Today, the residential sector accounts for about 16% of the energy consumed in the U.S., making it the third-largest, after the industrial and transportation sectors. While the focus is often on fixing the largest consumers, targeting individual behavior change is equally crucial for decreasing energy consumption and supporting sustainable energy infrastructure. Behavioral science has great potential to increase pro-environmental behavior, including reducing residential energy usage. Much literature suggests promising behavioral interventions to optimize household energy consumption.
Monetary incentives are often the tactic used to promote sustainable habits, but psychological theory indicates other strategies are just as, or more, impactful. The use of social norms is one of the most successful strategies. An individual perceiving a certain behavior as commonplace leads to a higher likelihood of the individual participating in the behavior as well. In addition to the use of basic social norms, emotive feedback can help when trying to decrease household energy consumption. Research shows that providing emotive feedback — such as happy faces for optimal energy consumption and sad faces for suboptimal energy usage — results in ideal energy consumption habits.
Another effective tool is message framing, which is the particular wording used on a prompt aimed at increasing sustainable behavior. Perhaps surprisingly, messages focused on educating people about an issue in the hopes of developing pro-environmental mindsets, as well as making them aware of what is to be gained by partaking in pro-environmental actions, are not very effective techniques for producing the desired behavior. Rather, messages that highlight what will be lost should the individual fail to partake in the desired behavior, have specificity toward the target audience, and cite credible sources are much more likely to result in the desired behavior.
Norms and message framing are two of the highly effective tools behavioral scientists have recently brought to the table to reduce energy consumption table. These tools highlight the increasing importance of behavioral science in conquering our world’s most pressing issues. While there are many facets of climate change, improving human behavior is key to finding a solution. It is essential to understand why we act the way we do to support this urgent journey towards a greener world.
