The Garrison Institute’s Climate, Mind and Behavior Program
It is increasingly clear that we can’t solve the climate dilemma without empowering all people to become part of the climate solution. Viable solutions will require a cultural transition to widespread sustainable practices that everyone can and does embrace. Behavioral approaches offer the promise of large, rapid, and relatively inexpensive means of reducing carbon emissions. However, those engaged with climate change research, advocacy or policy have already learned from experience that downloading objective information about climate change threats, no matter how compelling, is not an effective way to motivate action, whether on the policy front, or in terms of changing people’s behavior.
The social and behavioral sciences offer a body of evidence that challenges our traditional but flawed assumptions concerning human behavior and sheds light on the actual mechanisms at play. Such research is valuable in its ability to suggest more effective approaches to program design and communications that are resonant and motivating. At the same time, emerging knowledge from neuroscience and other research fields are revealing the ways our minds both help determine and are determined by our habits, perceptions, social relationships and interactions with the world around us.
Regarding climate change, the complexity of human cognition and behavior, which scientists are learning to appreciate more deeply, may be viewed as either an obstacle or as a powerful opportunity. Researchers concur that the characteristics of our minds and our behavior are not strictly rational in the neoclassical economics sense, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t able to respond to climate change effectively. On the contrary, human beings think and act in ways that are rooted in the social context in which they live. We are highly and uniquely adaptable in the face of changing contexts. This adaptability is one of our best assets for facing the challenges posed by climate change.
Behavioral research shows, somewhat counterintuitively, that attitudes don’t always determine behaviors. Engaging people in new behaviors often shapes new attitudes. Choice architecture, metrics, feedback, storytelling, value activation, tapping social networks and community-based methodologies are all examples of approaches that respect the complexities of human behavior and can provide mechanisms for effectively shifting it. Such approaches are already being deployed across the US and globally, and form a body of research and fieldwork that is growing and percolating significant change, from the grass roots to the policy sphere.
- Behavioral, neurological and social science research and insights into human thought and behavior, and into emergent behavior of social networks, are rigorously applied to new, evidence-based thinking about climate solutions.
- Online and face-to-face learning networks connect scientists, researchers, climate movement leaders, policy leaders, business leaders, funders and others working on climate issues to this information and to each other.
- National symposia and regional quarterly meetings with an implicit Theory U architecture and contemplative components.
- In addition to broader climate issues, subprojects and special meetings address climate solutions for cities and for the building sector. For example, the first annual 2011 “Climate Cities and Behavior” meeting convened and networked sustainability directors of major cities for the first time.
- Network participants use these resources to collaborate, incubating and implementing scalable, affordable, behaviorally literate climate solutions.
Behaviorally informed approaches to climate change solutions become widely known and practiced. They use our cognitive biases and evolutionary behavioral adaptations to advantage, and help establish new, pro-climate social norms that are self-reinforcing. This results in widespread behavioral shifts, which cost little or nothing to implement or may save money, and which create large-scale, positive changes in resource and energy consumption patterns, as well as in quality of life and sense of community. These changes cut GHG emissions very significantly in their own right, while also creating conditions for and enhancing effectiveness of policy and technological interventions.
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The Garrison Institute’s Climate, Mind and Behavior Program
