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When it comes to convincing citizens to make a commitment to the planet, setting an example or offering financial compensation remain the two most effective strategies, reports a vast meta-study conducted by an international team of researchers.
When it comes to convincing citizens to make a commitment to the planet, setting an example or offering financial compensation remain the two most effective strategies, reports a vast meta-study conducted by an international team of researchers.
How can people be persuaded to make an active commitment to the environment? Encouraging them to recycle their waste in exchange for financial compensation or challenging their neighbor to a game of "who will be the greenest?" will probably be more effective than pulling out the latest IPCC report. So suggests a recent meta-analysis by researchers from Cambridge University (England), Yale University (USA) and Gothenburg University (Sweden). Published in the journal PNAS, the research compiles the results of more than 400 studies on the factors that encourage citizens to adopt environmentally responsible behaviors in their daily lives. In total, six types of "interventions" were analyzed. The programs included actions to encourage recycling, sustainable mobility and electricity savings.
One of the key findings of this research is that citizens who took part in programs aimed at raising their ecological awareness increased their pro-environmental behaviors by an average of seven percentage points, compared to those who did not take part in such experiences. This figure can be as high as 12 percentage points for some types of interventions, particularly in the field of waste recycling. A relatively low figure, but one that provides interesting insight into the effectiveness of methods aimed at convincing citizens to get involved. "Interventions were found to be most effective in changing behaviors when based on social comparisons or financial incentives, but least effective when based on education or feedback alone," the researchers note, for example.
The effect was found to be more pronounced for small-scale interventions, ie, those involving fewer than 9,000 participants. "One explanation for this may be that small-scale studies are more often based on direct techniques such as face-to-face interactions, which have a greater chance of influencing behavior," says study co-author Magnus Bergquist of the University of Gothenburg in a statement. "Learning that people around us have started choosing vegetarian food or cycling to work is often a better motivation for getting people to change their behaviors," the researcher adds.
This idea is supported by research recently conducted by Danish researchers from the University of Copenhagen. According to this study, it could be easier to convince people to eat vegetarian food by drawing on our own experience, rather than by presenting tangible facts about the climate crisis, for example, the carbon impact of meat production on the planet.
