How I Am Beginning to Change Your Behavior

As the No Waste Program Coordinator for the Indiana University Office of Sustainability and a teaching assistant for a course entitled “Human Behavior and Energy Consumption”, I read, think, and talk quite a bit about effective strategies for changing behavior. It is a fascinating, complex, and interdisciplinary area of study that has countless connections to what college students call “the real world”. In my experience, I have noticed that nearly everyone studying behavior change arrives with and struggles through the same misconceptions. I’m going to briefly explain the biggest of these misconceptions and describe a simple model that helps me visualize it in the context of the intervention process.

We are bombarded with facts. Don't add to our burden.

The most significant misunderstanding I have observed is the common belief that distributing general information is an effective intervention for causing behavior change. It’s a simple theory; if I want you to change, I merely need to provide you with the facts. Unfortunately, this theory is completely wrong for two reasons.

First, it assumes humans are perfectly rational beings, and that every decision we make is the result of a careful calculation weighing the costs and benefits of every possible option. If this were true, actions such as party-line voting, overeating, and smoking probably wouldn't be as prevalent as they are. We rarely optimize; due to limited time, attention, and mental capacity (the literature calls this “bounded rationality”) we use personal heuristics, or rules of thumb, to quickly make a decision that seems to be, at least on the surface, optimal. This is why we stereotype and form lifelong opinions of people and places after just one experience – for the purpose of easy decision making.

The other reason why information may be ineffective is because, well, some people just don’t care. I once observed thirty students in a row walk up to a set of clearly-labeled trash and recycling receptacles and shove everything on their dining hall tray into the trash. They knew the recycling bins were next to the trash – honestly, if we made them any more obvious, they would be a fire hazard. Buying more bins or putting up more posters with more neat facts may cause a few to change, but most of them still won’t budge. The issue here is that sustainability-oriented initiatives utilize this model all the time, and while reducing the barriers impeding a desired action is a necessary step toward behavior change, it can’t stop there. To better explain where I’m coming from, I made the following diagram.

You may need to click on the image to enlarge it.

In the diagram, the spheres represent where a person might be in the change process. Since I've been using recycling as an example, imagine someone who does not recycle. Ideally, we should start our interventions by making the desired behavior easier (making sure there are an appropriate number of recycling containers, and making sure they are located next to trash cans) and making the undesired behavior harder (removing some trash cans).

We are now at the point I described earlier – the opportunity to adopt a new behavior (recycling) is right there, ready and willing; however, because (we know now) information and awareness isn't enough, more is needed. To push people from an old state (that is no longer very steady because we have lowered barriers) to a new state requires us to exert our influence in creative and somewhat sneaky ways. We must create new social norms -- imagine trying to get elevator riders to all face the back of the elevator rather than all face forward. Most sustainability-related lifestyle changes are no less difficult! This is an area where a lot of exciting, innovative research is being conducted, and there are many strategies that have been shown to be effective. I don’t have room to go into them here, so I will instead recommend a few great reads. To summarize my philosophy in a way that would make even Michael Pollan proud:

First change the environment. Then change the person.

Some great reads:

• Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
• McKenzie-Mohr’s Fostering Sustainable Behavior: An Introduction to Community-Based Social Marketing
• Thaler and Sunstein’s Nudge : Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness

Final Reflection

My best attempt at summing up what affected me the most this semester: Sustainability is a design challenge.

Jae Rim Lee, an innovative sustainability designer who is, most of time, too innovative for most people. Here she's wearing her Infinity Burial Suit, essentially clothing laced with mushrooms that decompose your body after burial.

Outside Experience #2: Greening Cream and Crimson

I volunteered with the student organization Greening Cream and Crimson several times this year. Coordinated by my friend and colleague Erik Schneider, GCC supports recycling efforts during home football games. Because simply viewing the Red Lot (Greek tailgating area along 17th St.) from a distance wasn't enough for me, I joined in the effort to prevent litter by providing extra recycling and trash infrastructure in the lot. For litter-haters, the following video is a nightmare:

Personal Project Final Report

Well, I've added "growing food in winter" to my list of things "easier said than done". I set out to try to grow food by whatever means through the cold months. Here's where I'm at right now:

1. The outdoor garden is hurting. I forgot to cover it for several nights of hard frosts, and I believe this stunted the growth of the lettuce, cauliflower, and peas. It killed the spinach. Most things are still growing, however. While I don't have anything to show to you right now, I should in a few weeks' time. I also fought pests, which set back the lettuces and spinach several weeks.
2. I didn't want to set up the hydroponics system and then immediately leave for Thanksgiving break, so I'm setting it up now. Later in this post I will show you some photos from last year's system, which I hope to replicate but improve.

Outdoor garden in cold weather - Photos:

My backyard garden, a.k.a poor man's hoop house. The scrap-wood rib cage holds up a plastic tarp

The Role of the Campus in Sustainability

Throughout this class, we've studied a thousand different ways to design human environments that minimize energy consumption, preserve ecosystem health, support public health, and draw communities together. But, as is the case with many things, walking the walk is not only more difficult than talking the talk, it’s an entirely different ball game. I, like Leith Sharp, former Harvard sustainability officer, have rolled my eyes plenty of times at university departments and whole institutions who teach about environmental and social problems but, as Leith says, “[operate] as if what the faculty was teaching was irrelevant” (Sharp, 2009). In this post, I argue that universities are not only ideal first-movers for sustainability initiatives, but also that they are socially obligated to do so. 

It is obvious to many that universities should be leaders in the teaching and researching of sustainability issues. But I also assume that most, if not all teachers of sustainability would argue that sustainability cannot be properly taught without demonstration. The issue here is that actually converting lifestyles and applying research to real-life systems is arguably the harder task. It’s so difficult that few societies – universities, communities, cities, or nations – have even wrapped their minds around it, much less achieved anything meaningful. 

Superblocks, Supercrowds, & the 11-Day Traffic Jam

I really got into the Calthorpe reading (the optional one) this week. We’ve been talking about physical community design for a while now, but this guy actually uses numbers. It’s a critical step in the transformation of an idea into reality. But as I went deeper into the theory (and recently, practice) of low carbon city design, I began to notice a dominate, repeating theme: China.

According to Calthorpe, China has been constructing its highway system at four times the rate the U.S. built its interstates. "Over the last decade, Shanghai alone has built some 1,500 miles of road, the equivalent of three Manhattans." China is now the world’s largest car market, and its cities are frantically building the roads and parking lots needed to accommodate. Recently, motorists near Beijing came to dead standstill for 11 days in a 60-mile traffic jam.

The traffic jam to end all traffic jams. Or rather, to end all hope of ever getting home.