Current Research
Decisions in a social and physical environment
Human decisions, and in particular decisions that impact sustainability and the quality of our natural environment, are made within a social and physical context. Our social networks tell us what others do. Following the norms of our peers confirms social identity and reduces processing costs. Norm violation often has negative social or material consequences, especially in collectivist cultures. What determines the perception of shifts in social norms, and can these dynamics be utilized to accelerate change and create tipping points in behavior?
Models of Human Behavior (MoHuB) 2.0
In collaboration with Dr. Maja Schlüter and colleagues from the Stockholm Resilience Center, we are extending Schlüter’s 2017 Ecological Economics paper, which provides a framework for the study of human agents and their social, physical, and biological environments in natural resource management (NRM) contexts that extends beyond the rational actor model. While the importance of accounting for the complexity of human behavior is increasingly recognized, its integration into formal models is challenging because many of the theories are scattered across the social sciences, cover only a certain aspect of decision-making, vary in their degree of formalization, and do not specify causal mechanisms. We are expanding and refining the 2017 MoHuB framework in order to develop a tool and common language for describing, comparing and communicating a more comprehensive set of theories of human judgment and choice that will be crucial for modeling various empirically observed behaviors that cannot be captured by the standard economic models.
Norm Dynamics as Agents of Social Change and Environmental Sustainability
Climate change and other environmental challenges will require social change of unprecedented proportions. Conventional ways of motivating social change via economic incentives or mandates often encounter political opposition or inertia. Promising research has tested interventions that motivate behavior change by altering perceptions of social norms. We will use panel studies in different countries – the United States, Italy, China, and India – to examine two important but completely under-investigated attributes of the success of such interventions: their longevity and their cross-cultural generalizability. By tracking perceptions, attitudes, perceived social norms, and behavior with respect to climate change, air pollution, or other environmental hazards, we can track the sensitivity of these variables towards variations in the physical and social environment and can measure immediate and long-term effects of top-down signals hypothesized to influence behavior via changed perceptions of social norms. The cross-cultural panel design will also allow us to identify the importance of different mediating mechanisms, hypothesized to differ among different cultures.
Institutional Signals and Social Norms Perception
When investigating social norms, questions of interest concern not only the effects of social norms on individual attitudes and behavior, but also the factors that influence the perception of social norms. Are some individuals or organizations more effective in influencing social norms and better able to promote social norms change? In this study, we investigate the impact of different institutional signals on perceptions of social norms, individual attitudes, and behavior. In particular, we look at how these variables change in response to similar institutional signals communicated by different sources, such as governments, business organizations and scientific institutions. Understanding the factors that influence perceptions of social norms can provide fundamental insights on how to address the large-scale coordination problems posed by climate change and similar global challenges.
Change and Resistance to Change in Organisations
In this ongoing project with Dr. Giovanna D’Adda, we are generally interested in understanding the influence of organizational culture – the set of shared principles and norms within a firm – on the ability of organizations and individuals to adapt their behaviors. In particular, we are designing complementary lab and field experiments to look at how behavior enforced in one context, via different regulatory structures, spills over to other (non-enforced or monitored) ones. This work is related to the literature on spillover and crowding out/in effects and may provide insight into how social norms are created, maintained, and generalized and whether they have cascade-like effects through impacts on adjacent behaviors. Additionally, we are interested in understanding how differences in regulatory structures (e.g. formal and informal) and the agency over these structures (e.g. endogenous or exogenous selection) affect subsequent behavior and spillovers. Stepping out a bit, we will also look at the interaction between intra-organizational culture and the broader set of societal norms and values in which they are situated (e.g. geographic, societal, peer, or family units).
Responses to energy and environmental technology and policy
People’s responses to existing or proposed technologies or energy and environmental policies is not entirely rational. Here we explore the full range of human goals and human processes that shape our responses to environmental change and energy technology transitions with the objective of designing choice environments that facilitate wiser or more rational responses.
Citizens’ Preferences towards Policies for Rapid Decarbonization
What are citizens’ preferences towards public policies for rapid decarbonization? And to what extent do a) the concrete design features of a policy, and b) ‘social influences’ like social norms and cues by opinion leaders affect citizens’ level of policy support?
Within this research project, we investigate public preferences with respect to two areas that could significantly contribute to rapid decarbonization: the phase-out of fossil fuel-based cars, and the employment of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies. Specifically, we use discrete choice experiments to elicit Americans’ policy preferences on various policy scenarios to get insights on the social acceptability of different pathways to decarbonization. The project not only contributes to current discussions about how to achieve the required decarbonization of energy (mobility and electricity) systems, but also to ongoing academic debates about the impact of social norms and elite cues on individual attitudes and behavior.
Environmental Motivations for Energy Efficiency Investments
Reducing energy use has multiple benefits for households, including saving money on utility bills and reducing household contribution to climate change. Although research has documented that emphasizing environmental motivations can influence small, repeated energy conservation behaviors, most research on large energy efficiency investments focuses on financial motivations. Existing energy saving policy reflects this financial focus, with most U.S. energy saving programs using financial incentives and savings to motivate participation. The influence of environmental motivations on large energy efficiency investments remains largely unexplored. The first phase of this project examined how financial and environmental motivations interact to influence large energy efficiency investment decisions, and how political affiliation moderates this effect. In our first round of studies, we find that, overall, messages that include environmental as well as financial benefits lead to higher investment likelihood than financial benefits alone. Environmental benefits are effective when aligned with participants’ political affiliation: climate change messages increase liberals’ likelihood, and stewardship/independence messages increase conservatives’ likelihood. Importantly, we failed to find evidence that motivation-misaligned messages (showing climate change to political conservatives) decreased investment likelihood. The second phase of this project explores the range of non-financial motivations that motivate energy saving behaviors across the political spectrum. We will examine what motivations are the most correlated with existing energy saving behaviors and future interest, and the variance in motivations across individuals. The third phase of this study will replicate these findings in the field. This work has implications for the messages that energy saving policies use to motivate behavior change.
Understanding Global Concern and Action on Climate Change
Concern about climate change varies substantially from one person to another, from one country to another, and sometimes from one day to the next. What causes concern about climate change to rally or dissipate in humans? How much of an effect does unusual and extreme weather have? What about coverage of climate change in the news? In this project we are shedding light on the drivers of concern and action on climate change by answering questions such as these. We use records of searches or discussions about climate change on social media as well as international survey data to measure concern about climate change across time and space. We pair these measurements with data on potential influencers of climate concern. For example, we are analyzing records of extreme weather events and massive databases of global news coverage to quantify their effects on concern about climate change. By learning more about what influences public attitudes towards climate change, we can optimize climate-related policies, communications, and long-term mitigation strategies. These analyses also allow us to test hypotheses related to the Finite-Pool-of-Worry hypothesis.
Attitudes, Beliefs, and Action in Response to Covid-19 and Climate Change
The COVID-19 pandemic is the most important public health challenge in at least a century. Yet, over the long term, its impacts could well be dwarfed by the consequences of global climate change. Addressing both the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change requires large-scale behavior change and rapid governmental response. However, in both situations, the consequences of inaction are delayed, the costs and benefits of inaction are unequally distributed, and harms grow exponentially; these features make it hard to learn from experience and lead to drastic underestimates of the costs of inaction. The sudden appearance of COVID-19, in the context of increased public concern about climate change, provides a unique and fleeting opportunity to compare public attitudes and behavior on these two issues and to understand how they evolve as this pandemic unfolds. In an NSF-funded panel study, we systematically compare public reactions in the United States to these two crises, tracking them as the full extent of the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds. We seek to understand the determinants and consequences of public responses to each risk, by examining both the analytic and affective dimensions of these responses, their interrelationship, and how they change in response to local incidence rates or personal exposure to the risks. A nationally representative survey enables us to examine how different segments of the public respond to each risk and to test focused hypotheses comparing these responses. A longitudinal dataset allows us to understand how responses evolve as the pandemic, and personal exposure to the pandemic, unfold over time.
Tools and scale development
Current work extends existing tools to different populations, designs scales to assess important constructs identified in prior work, or develops platforms and software that implements the emerging view of a complex adaptive yet only boundedly-rational decision maker.
Developing and Validating a Decision Modes Scale
How can the way in which we make decisions influence the outcome of our decision? Judgment and decision-making researchers have repeatedly documented that people make decisions in qualitatively different ways. Past research by Weber and colleagues has documented the existence of three distinct sets of psychological processes to make decisions: calculation-based, affect-based, and role-based decision modes. Calculation-based mode balances costs and benefits, affect-based mode focuses on present feelings, and role-based decision making takes advantage of existing professional, ethical, and social roles and their associated rules of conduct that guide our behavior. Use of different modes can be induced by different types of stimuli or interventions, and influences the outcome of our decisions. Research in the environmental domain has demonstrated that role-based decision mode is correlated with pro-environmental decisions, and that activating the increased use of role-based mode leads to increases in pro-environmental decisions. This project develops and validates a new scale to measure the use of these three modes across a variety of decision domains, and experimentally demonstrates how they influence our decision-making.
Adolescent DoSpeRT Scale
Models of Human Behavior (MoHuB) 2.0
In collaboration with Dr. Maja Schlüter and colleagues from the Stockholm Resilience Center, we are extending Schlüter’s 2017 Ecological Economics paper, which provides a framework for the study of human agents and their social, physical, and biological environments in natural resource management (NRM) contexts that extends beyond the rational actor model. While the importance of accounting for the complexity of human behavior is increasingly recognized, its integration into formal models is challenging because many of the theories are scattered across the social sciences, cover only a certain aspect of decision-making, vary in their degree of formalization, and do not specify causal mechanisms. We are expanding and refining the 2017 MoHuB framework in order to develop a tool and common language for describing, comparing and communicating a more comprehensive set of theories of human judgment and choice that will be crucial for modeling various empirically observed behaviors that cannot be captured by the standard economic models.