Environmental Psychology Best Practices #VIScoast, a talk for Show Me the Coast 2015. https://showmethecoast2015.wordpress.com/

1. ENVIRONMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
Paige Jarreau
Show Me the Coast 2015
#VIScoast

2. 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)
#VIScoast

3. WHY ENVIRONMENTAL
COMMUNICATION IS HARD TO DO…
#VIScoast

4. THE MYTH ABOUT FACTS & EDUCATION
#VIScoast
ILLUSTRATION BY MAKI NARO

5. 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.
#VIScoast

6. 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.
#VIScoast

7. 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
#VIScoast

8. 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
#VIScoast

9. 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.
#VIScoast

10. 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
#VIScoast

11. 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.
#VIScoast

12. MENTAL MODELS
http://kamleshparmar.com/tag/mental-models-charlie-munger/
#VIScoast

13. 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.
#VIScoast

14. A BETTER WAY
#VIScoast

15. 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?
#VIScoast

16. 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
#VIScoast

17. COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES INFORMED
BY ENVIRONMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
Targeted
Messaging
The Key
Components
Action
Knowledge
Listening
vs. Telling
General
messaging
best
practices
#VIScoast

18. 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
#VIScoast

19. 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
#VIScoast

20. • 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
#VIScoast

21. Norm-activation model (Klöckner & Matthies, 2004) modified by Niko Schäpke & Felix Rauschmayer
NORM-ACTIVATION MODEL OF
PRO-ENVIRONMENTAL BEHAVIOR
#VIScoast

22. • 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
#VIScoast

23. 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
#VIScoast

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

25. 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 Decisions
http://guide.cred.columbia.edu/guide/sec1.html
#VIScoast

26. “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/
#VIScoast

27. • 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
#VIScoast

28. 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
#VIScoast

29. 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
#VIScoast

30. 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
#VIScoast

31. #VIScoast

32. 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
#VIScoast

33. 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.
#VIScoast

34. GIVE PEOPLE ACTION ALTERNATIVES
#VIScoast

35. 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.
#VIScoast

36. 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
#VIScoast

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

38. 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
#VIScoast
Conservation Psychology: Understanding and Promoting
Human Care for Nature, By Susan Clayton, Gene Myers