SEAS alumna's study reveals how emotions can be leveraged to support environmental behavior change
Katie Williamson (MS ’18), says that she uses what she learned studying Behavior, Education and Communication and Environmental Justice at the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS) on a daily basis. As the manager of Learning and Tools at Rare’s Center for Behavior and the Environment, Williamson contributes her expertise to develop tools and programs that will help environmental practitioners use more behavioral and social science in their work and, most recently, she co-authored a study on leveraging emotions and behaviors to support environmental behavior change.
Williamson says that the tools and training opportunities she develops for environmental practitioners are important because understanding human behavior can help us be more effective in achieving environmental and social outcomes. Among the many behavior change strategies available, such as social influences, information, incentives or choice architecture, she says that emotional appeals have gotten less direct attention in encouraging sustainable behavior. “Other fields and disciplines have been successful in incorporating emotions in their messaging. Take, for example, messages to encourage voting or to get vaccinated,” says Williamson. “These are great examples of emotional appeals, and similar strategies can be used to motivate people to act more sustainably.” Thus far, there has been no clear guidance on which emotions to apply in which contexts and how to use them effectively, especially in the environmental field. “By looking at different emotions as functional states throughout our evolution and the kinds of psychological and behavioral responses they create, we can have a much better understanding of what emotions mean to us as a species. For example, fear has helped keep us safe from risky and uncertain situations; pride has helped us share our skills and knowledge with our social networks, and interest has motivated us to learn new information,” says Williamson.
Understanding the potential for emotional appeals, Williamson and Rare’s Director of Behavioral Science, Erik Thulin, set out to learn how emotions have helped humans adapt, and to find out what the behavioral responses from specific emotions are that can encourage changes in environmental behavior. Together, they conducted a literature review of specific emotions and how they might apply in environmental contexts, with a specific focus on identifying the function of each emotion. They created and analyzed a long list of emotions and their behavioral consequences to select the top six with the best potential to encourage environmental behavior change. They landed on: fear, hope, the prospect of shame, pride, anger and interest.
The peer-reviewed study’s findings, which were recently published in Ecology & Society, reveal that incorporating each of these emotions intentionally into behavior change solutions can help practitioners. “Some researchers believe that emotions lead us to make ‘irrational’ decisions, but the data suggest otherwise,” says Williamson. “Emotions have helped us adapt as a species in different ways and provide us with important information for how to act.” Still, she adds, it’s important to be mindful of the socio-cultural contexts within which emotions operate. “Some emotions exist cross-culturally, like the prospect of shame, but they may be encoded differently in each community and culture and affect certain individuals or groups in different ways due to power dynamics. As behavior change researchers, we have a responsibility to learn about these differences to make sure we are not causing harm, no matter what approach we are using.”
Williamson says that a big takeaway from this study is that understanding the functions of emotions can allow both researchers and practitioners to advance the science of behavior change and be more effective in achieving environmental outcomes and interventions. “Emotions are a core part of the human experience. By learning more about what they mean to people and how they relate to our actions, we have more opportunities to reach people on the issues that matter most. One exciting and emerging application involves the role of collective anger and collective hope for creating climate action.”
Reflecting on her work at Rare, with its focus on translating science into practice, Williamson says that she always had an interest in the intersection of humans and the environment. She says that her coursework at SEAS in environmental psychology, theories of behavior change, environmental justice, and community-driven processes provided her with the opportunity to refine her interests into the career she has today. “One of my favorite parts about SEAS was the ability to craft a curriculum based on my learning goals. In particular, I appreciated getting to develop a sharper behavioral and social science lens to apply to today’s environmental challenges,” says Williamson.
Read the paper here:
Leveraging emotion-behavior pathways to support environmental behavior change
Learn more about Rare and the Center for Behavior & the Environment.