Recently, I was asked to develop some “green” communications for my university department. I had two two climate conscious students, our wonderful Sustainability Champions (Hannah and Sage) to help me. Together, we hoped to shift the attitudes of students and colleagues in a more environmental direction. But what sorts of communications might help achieve that?
Researchers are very aware of the knowledge-action gap. Simply put, knowing an action is worthwhile doesn’t mean people will do it. Messaging is more than just providing accurate information, it needs to motivate. A scan of recent research findings suggested at least one form of messaging held promise.
Community Voices
The idea of using community voices arose from a collaboration at Oberlin College in Ohio. Psychologist Professor Cindy McPherson-Frantz was familiar with the idea of social norms and biologist John Peterson knew how feedback in ecological systems could drive change. Together, they wondered whether the knowledge-action gap was due to people not receiving enough feedback about what others were doing. In other words, people might be uncertain of what the current social norms were. Technology able to provide feedback about others’ attitudes and behaviour might fill the gap and help leverage social norms.
Psychology has often been used to encourage us do things. Usually, however, companies use it to make us consume more. Decades of psychological and neuromarketing research us used to promote stuff. Much of it we don’t want and may not even be good for us – let alone for the planet. Using psychology instead to encourage us to look after our environment would surely be a better idea?
Cindy explained that “community voices” involves identifying green actions and ideas already in the community and making them more visible. “So we’re really trying to give the community members feedback about what other community members are thinking and feeling.” Cindy explains. “This does a couple of really important psychological things. First of all, it helps to diffuse the phenomenon of pluralistic ignorance, which is when we just make all these assumptions about what everybody else is thinking and feeling and we’re wrong. And then it also helps to create a visible social norm like ‘You know what? Actually lots of people in my community are doing things!’”
But in respect to sustainability, the community voices approach may serve an additional role. It may encourage a sense of collective-efficacy, i.e. the belief that we can achieve something together. “With huge problems like climate change,” Cindy says, “it’s very easy for people to feel like it’s hopeless and that nothing they do matters. However, if we are working together as a community and we feel like ‘oh, lots of people besides me are doing this too’, suddenly it feels like it might be worth doing.”
Cindy and her colleagues had already run several online studies. These showed people who had seen this kind of content were more optimistic about solving environmental problems and more willing to take action. But the team wanted to know whether it work in the “real” world. In her community in Oberlin, large digital signs were installed that shared community voices content, They were installed in a variety of different locations.
The researchers surveyed people passing by before and two years after the installation. Amongst those spending time near the installation sites, they found a positive change in attitudes and self-reported actions. Importantly for testing the theory, they found thsi change was predicted by that how long people spent near the signs. The team were particularly excited that effects were observable amongst those whose voices were represented. “We made a heavy emphasis on making sure that we represented African American voices in our slides,” Cindy told me. “And that was the part of our sample that shifted the most. So it seemed to actually work.”
Inspired by Cindy, we set up a stall in the foyer of our building. We lured people over to us with free cookies and persuaded some of them to to let us record their thoughts about environmental issues and what they were doing to help the environment.
Positive or negative messages?
Having recorded our community voices, we then had that other thorny issue of which voices and messages we should select. In particular, would positive messages that induced hope be more effective than those which would induce concern or even fear? Cindy was very inclined towards the positive, saying “There’s kind of this instinct, I think, among environmentalists who sometimes to want to scream from the mountaintops ‘Everything is terrible’ to try to motivate people to act. But more times than not, that causes people to shut down and tune out. So we focus on positive messages”.
But the research findings on this issue give a rather mixed picture. Some suggest hope is important for inspiring action, while others emphasise the need for concern and cite fear as a strong potential motivator.
All this left me feeling uncertain, if not confused, so I decided to consult Professor Cassandra Troy, assistant professor in the department of Journalism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne. Cassandra had recently run an experiment to try to directly determine whether it’s better to go light or dark when it comes to persuasion. She’d studied how people reacted to messages about what the world might look like in 2040, testing a negative and positive message. She also compared a combination message that told people they could end up on a negative or a positive path depending on choices they were making right now. All the information in the messages was based on “The Future Earth” by Eric Holthouse.
The negative message produced fear and the positive message hope. Fear encouraged more sustainable intentions, and the combination condition had a similar effect to the negative message alone. However, while the negative and combined messages worked better than the positive message, a lot relied on participants’ collective efficacy. Collective efficacy is the idea that we can do something about it together. When people had high levels of collective efficacy, they were less defensive and more receptive than others to positive messaging. This notion of different individuals responding in different ways was a key finding of the research. In other words, there’s no simple rule, it’s about knowing your audience.
Cassandra explained: “What we see here is that whether you primarily focus on negative potential outcomes or positive future outcomes depends on your audience. Because if you already have audiences who know a lot about the issue, who are already fairly engaged in climate related efforts, positive messaging might be more effective. They’re already bought into the idea that this is a risk, they might not need additional risk information. But if you have less engaged audiences that are still movable on the topic, you probably still want to have some of that risk or fear evoking information in there.”
So, after all this great advice from our experts, we have produced a film for playing in our foyer. It features staff and students saying why they care about sustainability and what they already do about it. Hopefully, as people glimpse it in passing, it may help shift their attitudes and actions a little? It will be difficult for us to know. This isn’t a controlled experiment like Cindy and Cassandra’s work. But talking to our scientists has convinced me: We should think about the psychology when we want to communicate about climate change and sustainability. That is, if we want that communication to really make a difference.
Our voices – with many thanks to all these wonderful people who agreed to be filmed.
To discover more, listen to the associated podcast.