ENVIRONMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY

Paige Jarreau

Show Me the Coast 2015

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WHAT IS ENVIRONMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY?

Environmental psychology and conservation psychology address the relationships between people and their environments, including the

impacts that people’s attitudes and behaviors can have on the well-being of local and global

environments.

Conservation psychology uses “the insights and tools of psychology toward understanding and

promoting human care for nature.”

(S. D. Clayton, 2012)

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WHY ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION IS HARD TO DO…

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THE MYTH ABOUT FACTS & EDUCATION

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ILLUSTRATION BY MAKI NARO

THE SCIENCE AND PUBLIC/MEDIA “DISCONNECT”

• Why is there a disconnect between scientific consensus on environmental issues, and public/media perception?

• Interpreting Evidence – how humans interpret evidence, how they react to it, and how they form views based on it, is not merely related to the quality of the evidence.

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MOTIVATED REASONING

• A large number of psychological studies have shown that people respond to scientific or technical evidence in ways that justify their preexisting beliefs.

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MOTIVATED REASONING

• Confirmation bias = giving greater heed to evidence and arguments that bolster our beliefs

• Disconfirmation bias = expending disproportionate energy trying to debunk or refute views and arguments that we find uncongenial

• “Scientific evidence is highly susceptible to misinterpretation. Giving ideologues scientific data that's relevant to their beliefs is like unleashing them in the motivated-reasoning equivalent of a candy store.”

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/denial-science-chris-mooney

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MOTIVATED REASONING

• “Head-on attempts to persuade can sometimes trigger a backfire effect, where people not only fail to change their minds when confronted with the facts—they may hold their wrong views more tenaciously than ever.”

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/denial-science-chris-mooney

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MOTIVATED REASONING – THE PROBLEM WITH FACEBOOK

• Social media like Facebook allows us to only see views and opinions that we agree with –through our friends

• Users on Twitter, Facebook, etc. often have small, like-minded audiences.

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PSYCHOLOGICAL BARRIERS TO ACTION

• Limited cognition – ignorance, uncertainty, optimism bias, perceived behavioral control

• Ideologies – worldviews

• Comparisons with others – social norms and networks, perceived inequity

• Sunk costs – financial investments, conflicting values, goals and aspirations

• Discredence – mistrust, denial

• Perceived risks – functional, physical, financial, social, psychological

• Limited behavior – tokenism, rebound effect

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SAMPLING ISSUES

• What samples of evidence do people use when making judgments?

• People usually rely on a subset of information to make decisions, not all information possible, or even all the information they have.

• Confirmation Bias – People will downplay new evidence that is inconsistent with their working knowledge, previous experiences, and even deeper values and beliefs.

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MENTAL MODELS

http://kamleshparmar.com/tag/mental-models-charlie-munger/

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FOR EXAMPLE, WEATHER VS. CLIMATE

• “it was cold this spring… that global warming thing must be a myth”

• Requires an understanding of how the climate system works, time scales, natural variability, climate forcing, basic climate science, etc.

Greenhouse Gases: CO2, N20,

CFCs, O2, CH4 (methane), H2,

hydrochlorofluorocarbons, etc.

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A BETTER WAY

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INTERVIEWS WITH PSYCHOLOGISTS

• What does the field of social or environmental psychology have to say about best communication or messaging strategies to engage pro-environmental attitudes and behavior?

• Would you change your answers for communicating with a population in Louisiana, where people have more direct experience with coastal land loss / hurricanes?

• From your experience, are there better ways of presenting messages, visual elements, etc. to connect with public audiences?

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BASIC PRINCIPLES

• Know your audience

• Get your audience’s attention

• Translate scientific data into concrete experiences

• Beware the overuse of emotional appeals

• Address scientific and climate uncertainties

• Encourage group participation

• Tap into social identities and affiliations

• Make behavior change easier

• Make it Visual

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COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES INFORMED BY ENVIRONMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY

Targeted Messaging

The Key Components

Action Knowledge

Listening vs. Telling

General messaging

best practices

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Targeted Messaging

• Know your audience• Understand their needs,

motivations and values• Write from a local angle;

local concerns• Avoid stereotypes

video.pbs.org/video/2365470645/

• Be aware of your audiences’ cultural and religious values

• Find aspects of an issue that resonate with audience beliefs & concerns

• Target specific social networks with messages

Conservative values: prosperity, individual sovereignty & freedom

Issues that resonate: energy security, flood risks

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Action Knowledge

• Show people what they can do – give specific action alternatives

• People need to believe that their actions can help – room for hope and self-efficacy messaging

• Show connection between environmental behavior and impacts. Show people benefits/impacts of action

Action = adaptation to environmental issues as a lifestyle

Be solution-oriented vs. problem-oriented

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• Explain root causes of environmental issues and tie it back to human behavior

• Help audiences visualize impacts of their behaviors

• Behavioral Feedback

Action Knowledge

Tidy Street Project -http://ow.ly/Mj2cX

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Norm-activation model (Klöckner & Matthies, 2004) modified by Niko Schäpke & Felix Rauschmayer

NORM-ACTIVATION MODEL OF PRO-ENVIRONMENTAL BEHAVIOR

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• Create messages that spread, & connect on a deeper level

• Authenticity

• Think of audiences as active agents of change• Help audiences come up with their own solutions to

environmental problems they are facing• Self-paced exploration of knowledge• Understand how your audience sees the problem• Foster communities of action

Listening vs. Telling

www.usaid.gov

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General messaging

best practices

• Storytelling: Personal, local stories; good news• Avoid jargon, technical topics• Speak in a human voice• Talk about your own biases, insights, epiphanies

(e.g. as a journalist or scientist)• Give a “face” to environmental impacts• Vivid messaging• Help audiences visualize future changes• Here and Now (immediate and local)• Source credibility: People trust other community

members• Avoid hot button issues and terms

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OUM1Yy6glM&feature=youtu.be

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KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE

• Know your audience’s mental model• Ask them!

• Mental models are not static —people can update them by correcting misinformation, inserting new building blocks, and/or making new connections with existing knowledge.

Center for Research on Environmental Decisionshttp://guide.cred.columbia.edu/guide/sec1.html

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“The people in Southern Louisiana that I have met all seem to have a close relationship to the land. They are acutely aware of their

changing environment.”

- Julie Dermansky, http://www.scilogs.com/from_the_lab_bench/beast-it-a-

film-for-climate-science/

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• Consider people’s goals when framing a message. Tailoring messages to people’s natural promotion and prevention orientations increases the level of response for both groups.

• Bring the message close to home. Highlight the local current and potential impacts.

• Tap into people’s desire to avoid future losses rather than realize future gains.

• Present information in a way that makes the audience aware of potential current and future losses related to inaction instead of focusing on current and future gains.

• Remember that audiences may be more likely to make changes to their behavior if information is framed as “losing a little bit now instead of losing much more in the future.”

http://guide.cred.columbia.edu/guide/sec1.html

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PROCESSING INFORMATION

The human brain has two different processing systems: the experiential processing system, which controls survival behavior and is the source of emotions and instincts, and the analytical processing system, which controls analysis of scientific information.

Stronger motivator of action

http://guide.cred.columbia.edu/guide/sec1.html

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PROCESSING INFORMATION

• When creating presentations, use experiential tools such as:

• Vivid imagery, in the form of film footage, metaphors, personal accounts, real-world analogies, and concrete comparisons

• Messages designed to create, recall, and highlight relevant personal experience and to elicit an emotional response.

• A message that combines elements that appeal to both the analytic and experiential processing systems will best reach and resonate with an audience.

http://guide.cred.columbia.edu/guide/sec1.html

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THE WAY INFORMATION IS PRESENTED

A chance of 1 in 1000 and .1% are mathematically but not psychologically equivalent. Representing the chances of occurrence as frequencies can improve understanding of a complex problem. When possible, use simple terms and graphs to convey numerical information.

Information processing doesn’t occur in an emotional vacuum. Use vivid images, but do so with care to avoid emotional numbing or “despair” responses.

Discounting importance of future events

Judgments about the importance of future events/impacts tend to be discounted related to events happening now. Try to use specific and concrete examples of distance future outcomes, specifically in terms of local impacts that your audience can relate to.

Influence of affective

processing

Mathematically equivalent

information is not

psychologically equivalent

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BEWARE OVERUSE OF EMOTIONAL APPEALS

• The “finite pool of worry”

people tend to

pay more

attention to near-

term threats,

which loom

larger than long-

term ones

emotional numbing

http://guide.cred.columbia.edu/guide/sec1.html

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EMOTIONAL APPEALS

• Appeals to the emotional system may work in the short term, but it is hard for people to retain that level of emotional intensity.

• Balance information that triggers an emotional response with more analytic information.

• Acknowledge that the audience has other pressing concerns.

• Make audiences aware that emotional numbing can occur.

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GIVE PEOPLE ACTION ALTERNATIVES

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SOCIAL IDENTITIES AND GROUP ACTIVITY• Group affiliation can activate social goals (i.e., concern for others,

maximizing the good of the group).

• Participating in a group leads to greater intrinsic reward for individuals when group goals are achieved.

• Local messengers may get a stronger response to calls for action… People are more likely to take action when they feel a sense of affiliation with the individual or institution making the request.

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SOCIAL NORMS

• People will often “follow the crowd.”

• Messages given in an energy consumption study (by Cialdini) in San Diego:

http://opower.com/uploads/library/file/2/understanding_and_motivating_energy_conservation_via_social_norms.pdf

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http://opower.com/uploads/library/file/2/understanding_and_motivating_energy_conservation_via_social_norms.pdf

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HOPE

• In the face of climate change, pollution, loss of biodiversity, people may feel that human initiatives are constrained and even pointless. Can the environment provide a source of hope?

• Create messages that include hope, “positive psychology”

• When your messages contain negative information, pair them with positive visuals (e.g. images of healthy ecosystems when talking about biodiversity loss) & vice versa

• Empowering, positive messages of action & community

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Conservation Psychology: Understanding and Promoting

Human Care for Nature, By Susan Clayton, Gene Myers