🌿Wild Ones #68: Environmental Communication Digest
Environmental keyword "Green Nudge" + Soup & Van Gogh + Beautiful Troubles Toolbox + Rebecca Solnit: Climate Hope as Risk + More!
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🌱Environmental Keyword: “green nudge”
“An influential line of thinking in behavioral science, to which the two authors have long subscribed, is that many of society’s most pressing problems can be addressed cheaply and effectively at the level of the individual, without modifying the system in which individuals operate. Along with, we suspect, many colleagues in both academic and policy communities, we now believe this was a mistake.”
In my last Wild Ones, I linked to an interesting blog post by Ruth Taylor, a communications strategist working with the Common Cause Foundation: “Instead of relying on old narratives, it’s time to build power for new ones.”
In that thought-provoking post, Taylor cites a new article that caught my attention, published in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences by Nick Chater and George Loewenstein.
(On a side note: Nick Chater is a co-author of an interesting new book I read a few months ago, The Language Game: How Improvisation Created Language and Changed The World. Fair warning: there’s a lot about charades involved!).
In their article, Chater and Loewenstein express ‘misgivings’ about their past research on how behavioral science can promote positive behavior changes for social and environmental good. Their research draws on psychological insights to investigate behavioral interventions that can influence or ‘nudge’ individuals towards better environmental and health choices and actions. The aim is to find individual-level (‘i-frame’) behavior change solutions, that when scaled up to many individuals changing their behavior, can address big societal-level (s-frame) problems:
“The behavioral and brain sciences are primarily focused on what we will call the i-frame: that is, on individuals, and the neural and cognitive machinery that underpins their thoughts and behaviors. Public policy, by contrast, is typically focused on the s-frame: the system of rules, norms and institutions by which we live, typically seen as the natural domain of economists, sociologists, legal scholars and political scientists.”
However, the authors worry that the emphasis of their past work on ‘i-frame’ solutions has had the secondary effect of not only directing attention away from ‘s-frame’ policy solutions to solve big problems like climate change, but actually undermining public support for systemic solutions like government regulation of fossil-fuels.
“As representatives of cognitive science and behavioral economics,” Chater and Loewenstein confess, “the two of us have spent most of our careers working within the i-frame, and have had high hopes that new i-frame interventions might provide a key to good public policy. But over the past decade or so, we have begun to have misgivings.”
The authors spend a good chunk of the article taking issue with research on probably the most famous i-frame approach in behavioral science: ‘nudges.’ So I had to refresh my memory a bit on what a nudge actually is.
The nudge is an approach to behavior change made famous in a 2008 book of the same title by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein. In short, nudges are small behavioral interventions designed to positively influence people’s everyday behaviors and choices around things like saving money, eating healthier, or protecting the environment. The key is that people shouldn’t have to think too much about making those choices or taking those actions: a nudge should feel like the easier or automatic thing to do, but it shouldn’t feel forced (‘a shove’) either. As behavioral scientist Dave Nussbaum puts it in his essay, “How the science of human behavior is beginning to reshape the US government”:
“The goal of behaviorally informed policy is to make it easier for people to make good decisions, while preserving their ability to freely choose.”
In other words, nudges work by harnessing our cognitive limitations and biases, rather than enhancing people’s ability to make rationally informed, conscious decisions. Nudges simply make healthier and sustainable actions easier to do, and unhealthy and unsustainable actions harder to do. In discussing the enormous popularity of using nudges in sustainability and climate campaigns, Ruth Taylor links to several examples of ‘green nudges,’ such as the WWF’s carbon ‘Footprint Calculator,’ and lists with titles like “9 things you can do about climate change.” From a nudge perspective, one way to steer the actions and choices people make into more positive directions is not through the hard work of persuading people to change their minds, but by simply changing the ‘choice architecture’ in which their actions occur.
For example, the Little Book of Green Nudges, an info-booklet for university sustainability initiatives created in partnership with the UN Environmental Program offers “40 Nudges to Spark Sustainable Behaviour on Campus.” Green nudges in the book include things like: “Encourage people to bring their own mug by charging extra for disposable cups” and “Install shower timers in halls of residence.”
While these nudges – taking quicker showers, or not using disposable bags and cups – might seem limited in their impact to solve massive system-level crises like climate change, the idea is that these small actions can have big cumulative effects once hundreds or thousands of people begin to do them. Nudge researchers have called this spillover effect of small behavior changes adding up to big societal changes “the small BIG,” or as Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking Fast and Slow puts it,
“I am very optimistic about the future of that work [on the policy applications of nudge research], which is characterized by achieving medium-sized gains by nano-sized investments” (emphasis mine).
Underlying nudge research is a key finding in behavioral science that human beings are not the cold, hard logic-machines that the ‘rational actor’ model of traditional economics would like to assume. Instead, human beings are messy, emotionally-driven creatures with many cognitive biases and limitations. For example, as a species, we tend to avoid information that doesn’t fit our worldview (information avoidance), cherry pick information that confirms our pre-existing beliefs (confirmation bias), or take actions that have an immediate reward over longer term benefit (presence bias). In sum, the findings of behavioral science show that the everyday actions we take and choices we make – around everything from saving money for retirement to eating less junk food – are not based on ‘rational’ decision-making processes, but rooted instead in “frailties of human thought and behavior,” as Chater and Loewenstein put it. But it’s this fundamental view of human nature in behavioral science – that human beings are cognitively ‘frail’ – that they express worries about in their new article:
“The starting point [in nudge research] is the thought that many of societies woes stem from individual-level human failings, including excessive self-interest, present bias, diffusion of responsibility, information avoidance and confirmation bias. Unlike traditional policies, i-frame interventions don’t fundamentally change the rules of the game, but make often subtle adjustments that promise to help cognitively frail individuals play the game better.”
If ‘societies’ woes’ are rooted in individuals’ cognitive biases and limitations, then i-frame interventions suddenly seem like the best way to fix these woes, write Chater and Loewenstein. One side-effect of this narrative of human nature – that social and environmental crises are rooted in individual choices and actions – is that s-frame policy solutions like government regulations begin to appear as heavy handed ‘shoves’ that miss the real problem (individuals’ bad actions and choices). In other words, it seems you would feel most at home on the conservative side of the political spectrum, with bottom-up individual behavior change, not top-down government policy, as the solution to our societal woes. However, this isn’t how the psychologist Daniel Kahneman sees it. According to him, it is the scientifically false view that human beings are rational actors and logical decision-makers which fuels conservative policy and political ideology:
“If individuals are rational, there is no need to protect them against their own choices. At the extreme, no need for Social Security or for laws that compel motorcycle riders to wear helmets. It is not an accident that the department of economics at the University of Chicago, one of the most illustrious in the world, is known both for its adherence to a strict version of the rational actor model and for very conservative politics.” – Daniel Kahneman
This struck me as an interesting point. Because it suggests behavioral scientists – who reject the rational actor model in light of scientific findings that reveal a messier psychological model of the individual actor – would tend to favor s-frame policy solutions that change system behavior over i-frame interventions that change individual behavior. But this hasn’t been the case, argue Chater and Loewenstein. Their main misgiving is not that behavioral scientists’ focus on i-frame problems and solutions, since this research of course gives us a deeper understanding of human cognition. Rather, what the authors fear is “the unwitting (on the part of academics) alignment of interests between corporations and behavioral scientists focused on an i-frame interpretation of problems in tandem with proposed i-level solutions.”
It’s worth noting that a skepticism of s-frame solutions, and even outright rejection of s-frame policy to improve societal problems goes back to Thaler’s and Sunstein’s original definition of nudges, which goes like this:
“A nudge, as we will use the term, is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates. Putting fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.”
This is a pretty explicit rejection of s-frame policy. Now, I can understand why the i-frame approach is an extremely appealing way to address the world’s growing social and environmental crises. First of all, because nudges seem to work. There’s a reason why the marketing field draws heavily on behavioral science to shape our desires and preferences, why the food industry tweaks the taste of its products to tap into our physiological desires for salt, sugar and fat, or why social media companies have designed cognitive science-informed apps to hack our brains to steal our focus. These are, of course, some of the harmful ways nudge-style behavioral science has been mobilized for profit, and to social detriment. But Chater and Loewenstein also offer many examples of nudge research drawing on behavioral science insights to promote positive social and environmental well-being. Like a 2011 study conducted by Pelle Guldborg Hansen in Copenhagen which showed that brightly colored trashcans with footprints painted on the ground leading up to them reduced littering in the city by 46%.
A second reason why i-frame approaches have become so popular among policy makers is that they potentially offer a way to side-step political gridlock by taking policy interventions straight to individuals and avoid becoming “snared in legislative thickets….” write Chater and Loewenstein.
Related to the belief in the brokenness of politics and the gridlock of government, is a further idea that top-down, s-frame solutions like banning plastic bags to reduce their use, or passing health care reform to improve individuals’ health, have “costs perceived as daunting (especially in times of financial austerity). By contrast, i-frame policies typically focus on modifying policy implementation in ways that are cheap, quick and politically uncontroversial.” From this perspective, instead of costly government programs and policies, it is much cheaper, quicker and effective to create behavior change campaigns that nudge people towards better environmental and health practices by, for instance, texting them reminders to go to the gym, or making vegetarian menu items more visible.
Interestingly, the authors cite a 2017 study that showed how Japanese households “randomly assigned to report their energy-saving actions…were less likely to support a tax increase on carbon emissions.” This suggests that green nudges can have the unintended effect of encouraging people to be less supportive of climate bills and regulations, “by providing false hope that the problem of climate change can be addressed without imposing costlier, but immeasurably more effective, policies.”
Chater and Loewenstein cite Former President Bush’s HealthierUS campaign as one example adopting this i-frame approach to solve the U.S.’s big health care problem. As Bush put in a 2003 speech:
“We have a problem when people don't exercise and eat bad food. Obesity can cause serious health problems, like heart disease and diabetes...We must reverse the trend, and we know how to do it. It's exercise and good dieting. Good foods and regular exercise will reverse the trend and save our country a lot of money but, more importantly, save lives.”
David Cameron’s TED talk on the role behavioral science can play in helping to reduce government intervention offers another good example of how i-frame nudges are promoted, not as one component of a wider government policy repertoire, but as offering a completely oppositional alternative to ‘big government.’
As I’ve written about in previous Wild Ones and I’m sure many readers are familiar with, Bush’s health message here is remarkably similar to Big Oil’s effort to shift responsibility for climate change away from fossil-fuel corporations onto consumers, as Harvard researchers Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes have documented so well. Julie Doyle, professor of Professor of Media and Communication at University of Brighton, provides a further window into this uptake of i-frame approaches among fossil-fuel corporations, tracing how BP popularized the notion of the ‘personal carbon footprint’ as an effective tool to individualize responsibility for the climate crisis (following the tobacco industry’s playbook).
The i-frame five-step
Chater and Loewenstein trace five key steps in the corporate playbook for harnassing behavioral science i-frame research as a tool for blocking s-frame systemic reforms of the status quo:
Corporations invested in the status quo wage PR campaigns to spin big social and environmental problems as i-frame problems – individual problems with individual solutions – to prevent s-frame changes to the system.
Because of such a framing of societal problems as problems of individual behavior and cognition, behavioral scientists suddenly find themselves in a much sought-after position as equipped with the right tools to solve such i-frame policy problems.
The convergence of the above two points raises hopes that i-frame nudges can provide “cheap and effective solutions to conventional s-frame policy levers, such as regulation and taxation.”
However, i-frame interventions have underwhelming results, argue Chater and Loewenstein, with often small or null effects. At the same time, the spotlight on i-frame policy interventions steals attention away from building support for s-frame policy changes.
All the while, “Corporations themselves relentlessly target the s-frame, where they know the real leverage lies. They spend substantial resources on media campaigns, lobbying, funding think-tanks and sponsoring academic research, to ensure that the “rules of the game” reinforce the status quo.”
Reading these steps of the corporate playbook to divert responsibility towards consumers, and attention away from systemic change, reminded me of a similar ‘zooming in’ process of rendering big social issues individualized problems that the journalist Anand Giridharadas has called the ‘thought leader three-step.’ In examining the secret formula behind the rapid rise of certain academics to ‘thought-leader’ status in recent years, describing the journeys of Adam Grant, Brené Brown, and Amy Cuddy in particular, Giridharadas writes how their success as public intellectuals has been in large part due to their communication skills at “the rendering of social problems as unintimidating, bite-sized, digestible.”
He calls this capacity to render big s-frame problems as ‘digestible’ i-frame solutions the thought-leader 3 step, which involves 1) shifting focus to the victim rather than the perpetrator, 2) personalizing the political and 3) delivering “constructively actionable steps.” Giridharadas summarizes:
“In our own time…[thought leaders] are taking on issues that can easily be regarded as political and systematic—injustice, layoffs, unaccountable leadership, inequality, the abdication of community, the engineered precariousness of ever more human lives—but using the power of their thoughts to cause us to zoom in and think smaller.”
There’s an interesting story that Giridharadas tells about the thought-leader journey of Amy Cuddy, an established social psychologist of sexism and prejudice whose 2010 TED talk on ‘power posing’ now has 21 million views. When this talk went viral, it made Cuddy famous and invitations to speak at companies around the world came pouring in. Cuddy describes in her interview with Giridharadas how after her TED talk, suddenly company after company around the world wanted her to come speak to their employees and ‘fix’ prejudice and sexism in the company. But they weren’t interested in her academic work on the systemic roots of sexism in society, or the systemic solutions needed to solve them. Instead, CEOs wanted to hear about the practical behavioral strategy for confidence-boosting she introduced in her TED talk – the ‘power pose’ – which employees could use as an actionable step, a digestible and bite-sized life hack, that victims could take on board to confront sexism and prejudice, not as a systemic problem, but as a personal dilemma:
“Strangely, one of the things that makes it easier to accept the system is that when you do, you will find yourself being told more often that you are changing things…
…Without necessarily intending to, [Cuddy] was giving MarketWorld what it craved in a thinker: a way of framing a problem that made it about giving bits of power to those who lack it without taking power away from those who hold it…”
‘MarketWorld,’ writes Giridharadas, is “an ascendant power elite that is defined by the concurrent drives to do well and do good, to change the world while also profiting from the status quo.” Chater and Loewenstein express a similar worry about their work getting sucked up into MarketWorld: about their “unwitting (on the part of academics) alignment of interests between corporations and behavioral scientists.” This worry of theirs reminded me of how Giridharadas’ describes the influence of MarketWorld and its underlying philosophy for molding s-frame ‘critics’ into i-frame ‘thought-leaders’: “Inspire the rich to do more good, but never, ever tell them to do less harm; inspire them to give back, but never, ever tell them to take less; inspire them to join the solution, but never, ever accuse them of being part of the problem.”
“Our goal in this paper is not, therefore, to discount the important role that behavioral science has to play in public policy, but to provoke a discussion among behaviorally-oriented academics about how our focus on individual-level interventions has failed to promote, and, in fact, has sometimes inadvertently stifled, the effective public policy required to address the diverse problems that plague our societies.”
In Ruth Taylor’s essay where I first learned about Chater’s and Loewenstein’s new article, she calls attention to a key point the authors make about the ‘secondary effects’ of our work, and how the often unintended effects of framing problems as questions of personal choices and actions can risk promoting a dominant narrative that we should think smaller about our power to exert influence in the world. Instead, Ruth calls for taking stock of the secondary effects our work has to ensure that they promote “alternative narratives of interconnection, showing people how intertwined our lives are with one another and the living world around us, and building support for more transformative responses to the multiple crises we face.”
My guess is that ‘green nudges’ and nudging more generally will continue to remain a popular i-frame policy tool, especially in countries with governments opposed to any meaningful environmental legislation, as nudges promise to make incremental improvements to existing policies rather than threaten the status quo. But if so, these kinds of nudges will likely remain ‘fudges’: distractions from addressing the systemic roots of the climate crisis and and a host of other interwoven societal challenges.
Part of the issue is that an i-frame perspective is not very good for zooming out and asking questions about the origins of big social or environmental problems, why certain systems have arisen differently in differently places, and how a better understanding of such questions can give us insight into how to fight for systemic change. At the same time, as the political scientist Karen Liftin points out, zooming out too far “removes environmental problems from the realm of immediacy where meaningful action is possible and most likely to be effective.” So the challenge ahead seems to me to be to find innovative ways to bring i-frame and s-frame communication approaches together, and explore units of social change and influence beyond a green nudge: maybe as a kind of interdisciplinary green sludge (or kludge?). Whatever shape green nudge research takes in the future, I think the important point will be to find ways forward that help us avoid becoming, as Chater and Loewenstein warn us, “unwitting accomplices to forces opposed to helping create a better society.”
📚 What I’m reading
“To hope is to risk. It’s to take a chance on losing. It’s also to take a chance on winning, and you can’t win if you don’t try (even though the campaign may be won without you). We who have materially safe and comfortable lives, and who are part of societies that contribute the lion’s share of greenhouse gases, do not have the right to surrender on behalf of others. We have the obligation to act in solidarity with them. This begins by recognising that the future has not yet been decided, because we are deciding it now.”
🎧 What I’m listening to
An interview with N.K. Jemisin. The Ezra Klein Show.
“In her fiction, Jemisin crafts worlds that resemble ours but get disrupted by major shocks: ecological disasters, invasions by strange, tentacled creatures and more — all of which operate as thought experiments that can help us think through how human beings could and should respond to similar calamities.”
🔍 Tools, Opportunities & Resources
Story of self, us and now. From the Beautiful Trouble Toolbox: Creative tools for a more just world:
“Public narrative is a practice of leadership; it’s the why of organizing — the art of translating values into action through stories”
📰 News and Events
You probably heard about ‘#soupgate’ recently, when climate activists from Just Stop Oil threw cans of Tomato Soup at at Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers in the National Gallery in London. There is so much in this story for thinking through environmental communication, that I’m hoping to delve into some of the conflicting reactions to it, not just from the usual anti-climate crowds, but from people within the climate movement who felt strongly the action was either a major set back for climate activism in reinforcing negative attitudes, or in contrast, an important conversation starter in the media. What are your thoughts?
In the meantime, here are some of the reactions that caught my attention:
Do we really care more about Van Gogh’s sunflowers than real ones? By George Monbiot in The Guardian.
“The soup-throwing and similar outrageous-but-harmless actions generate such fury because they force us not to stop listening, but to start. Why, we can’t help asking ourselves, would young people jeopardise their freedom and their future prospects in this way. The answer, we can’t help hearing, is that they seek to avert a much greater threat to both.”
Throwing Soup at Paintings Wont Save the Climate. By Eric Levitz in New York Magazine.
“There is little reason to believe that Just Stop Oil’s plan of attack is the most equitable and effective way of combating the climate problem. We need more climate-conscious young people to dedicate themselves to tackling the technological barriers to decarbonization and formulating industrial policies that erode the political ones.”
Here is one of the activists from Just Stop Oil explaining the thinking behind the action (transcript and video below):
“I recognize that it looks like a slightly ridiculous action. I agree, it is ridiculous. But, we’re not asking the question should everyone be throwing soup on paintings. What we’re doing is getting the conversation going so we can ask the questions that matter. Questions like: is it okay that Liz Truss is licensing over a hundred new fossil fuel licenses? Is it okay that fossil fuels are subsidized thirty times more than renewables, when offshore wind is currently nine-times cheaper than fossil fuels? Is it okay that there is an action that has led us to the cost of living crisis, where this winter people are going to be forced to choose between heating and eating? This is the conversation we need to be having now because we don’t have time to waste. Last year Sir David King said what we do in the next three to four years will determine the future of humanity. So we’re doing these actions to get media attention so we can get people talking about this now. And we know that civil resistance works, history has shown us that it works. I’ve stood here today as a queer woman, and the reason I’m able to vote, the reason I’m able to go to university, hopefully someday marry the person I love, is because of people who have taken part in civil resistance before me.”
📚 Research
A corpus-assisted ecolinguistic analysis of the representations of tree/s and forest/s in US discourse from 1820-2019. By Robert Poole & Marco Micalay-Hurtado (2022). Applied Corpus Linguistics, 2(3).
Purgatory islands and climate death-worlds: Interrogating the journalistic imperative to witness the climate crisis through the lens of war. By Hanna Morris, in Journal of Environmental Media (October 2022).
Cable news and COVID-19 vaccine uptake. By Matteo Pinna, Léo Picard & Christoph Goessmann in Nature: Scientific Reports (October 2022).
Sustainability spectacle and ‘post-oil’ greening initiatives. By Natalie Koch in Environmental Politics (September 2022).
Communicating the Future of Energy Use: Qualitative Insights into the Efforts of Environmental Groups in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. By Shirley S. Ho, Wenqi Tan, Tong Jee Goh, and Edson C. Tandoc Jr in Environmental Communication (August 2022).
💡 Ideas
On Bruno Latour (1947–2022) The world was his laboratory. By Ava Koffman in n+1 Magazine.
Climate anxiety is spreading all over the planet The broadest look yet shows it's not just a Western worry. By Kate Yoder in Grist.
FROM BLAH, BLAH, BLAH TO BLOOD, BLOOD, BLOOD: Holding the COP27 Summit in Egypt’s Police State Creates a Moral Crisis for the Climate Movement. By Naomi Klein in the Intercept.
💬 Quotes I’m thinking about
Jonathan Watts: “Can an idea go viral like a disease?”
Bruno Latour: “Covid has given us a model of contamination. It has shown how quickly something can become global just by going from one mouth to another. That’s an incredible demonstration of network theory. I’ve been trying to persuade sociologists of this for 40 years. I’m sorry to have been so right. It shows that we must not think of the personal and the collective as two distinct levels. The big climate questions can make individuals feel small and impotent. But the virus gives us a lesson. If you spread from one mouth to another, you can viralise the world very fast. That knowledge can re-empower us.”
– Bruno Latour, in interview with Jonathan Watts, in the Guardian, June 2020.
“Whenever I visit the National Gallery, I can’t help but wonder how many of the places in its treasured landscape paintings have been destroyed by development or agriculture. Such destruction, which Truss, Braverman and the rest of the government now plan to accelerate, even in our national parks, is commonly justified as “the price of progress”. But if someone were to burn or slash the paintings themselves, it would be an abhorrent act of brutality. How do we explain these double standards? Why is life less valuable than the depiction of life?”
– George Monbiot, The Art of Life
Thanks so much as always for your interest in my work, and if you found this digest useful, please consider sharing with others who might find it interesting too😊 I'd also love to hear from you. Leave a comment to let me know what you think about this digest, what areas of environmental communication you’re involved in/most interest you, or anything you’d like to see more of in Wild Ones:)