June 10, 2013 This report was funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. We thank the foundation and project officers Kate Wing, Meaghan Calcari Campbell, and Eric Jacobsen for their support. The final draft has benefitted enormously from the expertise of our reviewers—Michael Mascia (World Wildlife Fund), Carol Saunders (Antioch University), and Diana Liverman (University of Arizona). Thank you also to Karin Schwartz (George Mason University) for her research assistance, and Ryan Richards for his editorial review. All errors are those of the authors. Karen Akerlof, PhD Center for Climate Change Communication George Mason University 4400 University Dr., MS6A8 Fairfax, VA 22030 [email protected] Chris Kennedy, PhD Department of Environmental Science and Policy George Mason University 4400 University Dr., MS5F2 Fairfax, VA 22030 [email protected] Cover photo ‘Earth & Sky’ by Marco Beltrametti (www.mbeo.ch) under Creative Commons license 2 Contents Executive summary .......................................................................................................................... i Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Traditional policies for changing behavior ..................................................................................... 3 "Soft" policies for behavioral change ............................................................................................. 6 Distilling lessons for evidence-based practice from research ....................................................... 10 Building behavioral science into conservation efforts .................................................................. 11 Recognize social, cultural, and economic factors ................................................................... 13 Collection and tracking of key social indicators ..................................................................... 15 Developing behavioral interventions programmatically ............................................................... 16 Selecting behaviors to target ................................................................................................... 17 Audience identification ........................................................................................................... 19 Designing a strategy: Factors and techniques ......................................................................... 20 Implementation and evaluation ............................................................................................... 21 Areas of influence for changing individual behaviors .................................................................. 24 1. Promote favorable attitudes ................................................................................................ 24 Strengthening attitudes................................................................................................ 25 Barriers ........................................................................................................................ 25 Cognitive dissonance .................................................................................................. 26 2. Increase personal agency .................................................................................................... 27 Influential factors ......................................................................................................... 30 Modeling behaviors ..................................................................................................... 31 3. Facilitate emotional motivation .......................................................................................... 31 3 Value of good feelings ................................................................................................. 34 Fear appeals ................................................................................................................. 35 4. Communicate supportive social norms ............................................................................... 36 Boomerang effects ....................................................................................................... 38 Breaking the social contract ......................................................................................... 38 Personal norms ............................................................................................................. 39 Fairness ........................................................................................................................ 39 5. Alter the environmental context; design the choice ............................................................ 41 Defaults ........................................................................................................................ 44 Reference dependence ................................................................................................. 44 Complexity ................................................................................................................... 45 Intertemporal choice .................................................................................................... 45 Putting it together: Multiple factors .............................................................................................. 46 Moving targets: The evolution of behavioral change in people and populations ......................... 50 Stages of change .......................................................................................................... 51 Network dissemination of ideas and behaviors ........................................................... 51 Next steps ...................................................................................................................................... 52 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 57 Case Studies 1. Beliefs, attitudes and behavior: Farm forestry in Pakistan ....................................................... 28 2. Attitude and action gap: Ecotourism's influence on attitudes, but not behaviors ..................... 29 3. From believing you can do it to doing it: Positive self-assessments translate to recyling........ 32 4 4. Providing opportunities to master new behaviors: Cultivating overharvested species ............. 33 5. Emotion motivates action: Acknowledging its role in forest management protests ................. 37 6. Defining what's socially acceptable: Theft of petrified wood in a national park ..................... 42 7. Social norms vs. information provision: Water conservation messages that motivate ............ 43 8. Simplifying choices: Less information makes for better decisions .......................................... 47 9. Certain gains win vs. uncertain losses: Presenting managed fires as necessary ....................... 48 References ..................................................................................................................................... 59 Appendix: Methodology ............................................................................................................... 81 5 Executive summary As the world’s human population has surpassed 7 billion, few places on the globe escape the pervasive impact of our species. Human behavior constitutes the primary threat to the world’s biodiversity both directly, via harvesting of living natural resources, and indirectly, as a result of habitat destruction, pollution, the introduction of invasive species, and climate change. While traditional policy tools, such as regulations, taxes, and subsidies, have been successful in achieving many conservation gains, continued environmental degradation has spurred interest in new “soft policy” approaches based on social and behavioral science that encourage the voluntary adoption of individual behaviors supportive of sustainable resource use. This paper synthesizes foundational knowledge from psychology and behavioral economics, and other applied fields like public health, to develop recommendations for incorporating behavioral- change interventions in promotion of the health and wellbeing of natural ecosystems. We identify five “areas of influence” that provide opportunities for promoting pro-environmental behavior: attitudes, agency, emotions, social norms, and environmental or decision context. We discuss the ways in which these areas of influence might be utilized by conservation practitioners and provide a framework within an adaptive management structure for the implementation and evaluation of behavioral-change interventions targeted at individuals. Specific recommendations in considering programmatic development include: 1. Explicitly utilize evidence from social and behavioral sciences in the design of conservation initiatives. 2. When possible, include social science research within conservation programs in designing strategies, selecting behavioral targets, and evaluating results. There is i especially a need for experimental or quasi-experimental designs to identify causal relationships. 3. Develop and track social indicators for target sites (similar to ecological indicators) that represent attitudes toward conservation, perceptions of fairness, resource dependency, and other factors that influence the success of conservation efforts. 4. Bring behavioral change researchers and conservation