Tiny Planet Problems

What’s socially acceptable in terms of personal environmental impact is quickly changing. It’s already an embarrassment to drive a diesel car, and social stigma is starting to cling to juicy steaks and long flights for short vacations too. And while we do need to put an end to those kinds of behaviors, is the vigilant policing of thy neighbors’ eating and flying habits actually useful? Will it change them?

First, an important interjection: Changing the habits of individuals is only a small part of what’s necessary to stop the ongoing planetary breakdown. The private sector (think aviation, agriculture, transportation, energy and so on) will also need to seriously change. Still, while one person’s abstinence might only make a small contribution, it’s a contribution nonetheless, and there’s an important side effect: Change in public opinion can drive policy change. So in other words, changing one person’s views may be the first step toward changing policy and, in turn, practices in the private sector.

But how to change someone’s views, let alone behavior?

“Communication must resonate on hope rather than reprimand…” says Dr Charity Mutegi @IITA_CGIAR in her communication presentation made during the regional forum to launch EAC policy briefs on Aflatoxin prevention and control. @Cath_Njuguna @jamesplegg pic.twitter.com/IcoV9wIabj

— George Mahuku (@GMahuku) August 16, 2018

I first started pondering this, in the context of environmental impact, when I came across the tweet above. What Dr. Mutegi is saying, that communication intended to change behavior must resonate hope rather than reprimand, intuitively makes sense to me.

But we don’t have to rely on intuition as the public health sector has been the subject of significant research, particularly focused on discovering what makes individuals change their behavior (like practicing safe sex or stopping smoking, for example). Some seemingly important cues below:

1. ‘Nudging’ people toward better habits has been lauded as an acknowledgment that people don’t always act rationally. We know that a bag of M&Ms does not constitute a healthy lunch, but we might eat it anyway. However, small changes in our environment may nudge us to make better choices, almost unconsciously. Like when Google moved their M&Ms from transparent to opaque containers, resulting in a 9% decrease in calorie intake from candy on campus in just one week. I’d like to imagine that having a train option built into Google Flights (Google Trains?!) could push me to pick a more sustainable form of transportation.
2. Painting a vivid picture is also believed to be an effective measure. For example, when Jamie Oliver put on show a full-size container loaded up with animal fat, he may have helped spark changes to diets in US schools, and a 1788 diagram showing the insides of a slave ship is considered as having been crucial to the rise of the abolitionist movement. It remains to be seen whether new and scary visualizations of ever more wild weather can help drive actions against climate change. In any case, “vivid” seems to be the key component — just handing people information will not make them change.
3. Using peer pressure is where it gets sticky. Some say that our natural search for a social license to operate, for acceptance, can lead us to change behavior. The implication being that peer pressure can be employed to remedy societal ills. But, peer pressure can also have negative outcomes, and significant evidence indicates that shaming doesn’t work — on the contrary. (Imagine someone who’s been told their whole life to stop smoking because it’ll kill them; they’d rather die of cancer than let other people tell them what to do).

A final point worth highlighting I picked up in this very readable paper Why is changing health-related behaviour so difficult? In it, the authors argue that we should be turning the problem on its head: Don’t try to predict which interventions (campaigns, incentives, punishments) will have an effect as that will in any case depend on the context, the timing, the characteristics of the people you try to influence, and so on. Rather, work on a case-by-case basis and investigate the conditions preceding the unwanted behavior, thus gaining insight into which mechanisms to put an end to. But in the healthcare sector, that’s possible thanks to personal interactions between caretakers and patients. In the environmental realm, there’s no such obvious avenue for bespoke behavior change therapy.

So while changing behavior is, unsurprisingly, a complicated endeavor, cues from the public health sector seem to make one thing pretty clear: Don’t shame thy neighbors — it won’t make them stop flying.

While I was trying to take a break from my regular dooms day-oriented pessimism over the holidays, I happened to read Elizabeth Kolbert’s comment on the recent Climate COP.

She doesn’t convey much hope nor holiday cheer—as aptly indicated by the Coal-for-Christmas headline. Rather, she does a hard reality check on the lack of progress since the Paris Climate Agreement was reached in 2015.

At that time the idea was for all signing parties to collaborate on overcoming the global climate challenge by letting each country set and achieve its individual emission reduction targets. But then, as we know, things changed:

“Back in 2015, this might have been a reasonable expectation. Now, in the era of America first, it looks increasingly like wishful thinking.” (And the US is not alone in showing dwindling commitment). Carbon emissions are on the rise again; Kolbert writes that they have increased by more than three percent in 2018.

“Climate negotiations,” she ends, “can no longer be considered even a useful fiction.” Of course the evidence of the ongoing climate breakdown is abundant, but maybe Kolbert takes it one step too far here.

Don’t we risk accelerating our own demise if we’re not even willing to believe that overcoming the climate crisis is a possibility?