Beyond Changing Light BulbsThe psychology of behaviour change

By Jane Genovese

Have you ever come across this sort of thing before “10 easy ways to save the earth”?

I used to love this stuff. I’d look at the list of top 10 ten tips, I’d follow them

religiously, I’d be recycling, changing light bulbs, and by the end, I’d be feeling like

an eco-warrior!

But when I fully confronted the scale of the environmental problems we face, I

realized that changing light bulbs wasn’t going to cut it.

We need to rethink our whole way of living.

So 2 years ago I asked myself the question “how do we get people to live simpler, less

consumption based lifestyles?” In other words, how do we reduce people’s ecological

footprint?

And it turns out there’s no simple 10 steps to take. Humans are complex and we’re

not as rational as we may think. So tonight I’m going to focus on three ways you can

change your behaviour – through disrupting habits, social norms and values.

So has anyone here ever tried to change someone’s behaviour before? Maybe you felt

someone needed to lose weight so what you did was you gave them a book or a

brochure. And maybe the person changed. But chances are they probably didn’t.

You see there’s this assumption that if you provide people with the right information,

this will change attitudes and lead to behaviour change.

And yes, it’s true to some extent, if you are ignorant you’re not going to take any

action.

But let me ask you this, do you know someone who is quite concerned about the state

of the environment but they still drive a big car and fly frequently?

So information on its own does little to change human behaviour.

And humans don’t always act in line with their values and beliefs.

Why is this? One major reason is mindless habits. Think of when you go shopping for

groceries, you probably buy the same milk, bread and toothpaste every time. Habits

help you to navigate through the hundreds of consumer choices. They make our lives

easier.

And we can learn a lot about habits by looking at popcorn. Raise your hand if you

usually eat popcorn when you go to the movies? So there was this one experiment

where researchers got a group of participants to rate some movie trailers before

watching a movie. One group of participants were given a box of fresh popcorn, the

other group got a box of stale 7 day old popcorn, but they didn’t know it was stale.

What the researchers found was participants who only ate popcorn occasionally,

didn’t really like the stale popcorn as much as the fresh stuff and didn’t eat much, but

the participants who were in the habit of eating popcorn at the cinema ate just as much

of the stale popcorn as if they had been given the fresh popcorn. So even though the

popcorn tasted disgusting, they ate it because they were in a habit of doing this. And

here’s the interesting thing: when the researchers changed the context and showed

participants the music videos in a meeting room, the habitual popcorn eaters ate

significantly less stale popcorn than the fresh popcorn.

So habits are automatic behaviours that are triggered by particular environmental cues

in stable contexts. They develop because they’re repeated and they’re repeated

because there is usually some kind of short term reward associated with them.

Think of unsustainable behaviours like driving a car and eating fast food – these are

often habits!

But the thing about habits is they can cause you to develop tunnel like vision. You can

overlook new information on how to do things better.

So who here has a habit that you’d like to break?

OK so here’s what you do: start to notice what triggers that habit and then develop

your self control to resist the urge to engage in the behaviour or replace the behaviour

with an alternative behaviour.

Let me give you an example of this from my own life. Last year my husband and I

developed a bad habit of eating out all the time. What would happen is we’d come

home from work and our conversation would go something like this –

“I’m hungry. What are we having for dinner?”

“I don’t know.. I’m tired”

“I don’t feel like cooking..let’s eat out”

“We probably shouldn’t but..ok!”

So we’d go out and usually have something high in fat and salt which was instantly

gratifying and this was happening night after night.

It dawned on me that this wasn’t healthy, this wasn’t good for us. So I decided next

time I hear those words “What’s for dinner?” I was going to have a simple recipe on

standby and say “Peter! We’re cooking this, let’s get started!”

Now that worked about 90% of the time.

An even better way to break a habit is to change your environment and remove the

cues that trigger the behaviour.

One of the reasons we were eating out all the time was because we lived 100 meters

away form a café strip and we were surrounded by temptation. Once we moved house

to an area where there were no cafes, let me tell you, we broke that habit once and for

all. Healthy home cooked meals became the norm.

Now if you are serious about living more sustainably it means you have to go against

the social norm. You need to take a stand against consumer culture.

To live in opposition to these dominant values can be tiring though. For instance,

some of you may be taking part in the plastic free July challenge at the moment and if

you are, you’ll know that trying to source all your food without plastic packaging and

to have to say “no plastic bag”, “no straw please” can be exhausting. On the other

hand, when you just mindlessly consume and don’t consider the impact your

behaviour has on other species and the planet – that’s easy.

Thanks to advertising, many of us have confused the good like with the goods life.

The advertiser Frederic Briegbeder once said this - “I’m an ad man, making you drool

is my mission. In my line of work, no one wants your happiness because happy

people don’t consume”.

We are sold the message that a happy and successful life is one in which you acquire

material and financial wealth.

But the research on happiness is firmly established and suggests that once your basic

needs are met, buying stuff and earning more money does little to improve your

wellbeing. But many people have learned to evaluate their own wellbeing and

accomplishment not by looking inwardly at their integrity, wisdom, and the

contributions they make to their community but they get their sense of self worth from

what they have and what they can buy. These people are driven by materialistic

aspirations and goals. And here’s what we know: people who are highly materialistic

are less happy, have more health problems and are more likely to have larger

ecological footprints than others.

Social scientists are now looking at ways to make people less materialistic. They are

exploring ways to shift people values so that they are less focused on external things

such as status and acquiring material goods and more inwardly focused on connecting

with others and to nature. They’ve found that simply by getting people to reflect and

write about the importance of an intrinsic value such as connecting with nature,

decreases peoples materialistic values. Practicing mindfulness and gratitude are other

ways that are being explored to get people off the consumer treadmill.

So to end, I’d like to leave you with this - some people tend to associate sustainable

living with a lower standard of living and having to go without certain things. For my

research, I interviewed people who had simplified their lives by working less and

consuming less. These people had disrupted their automatic habits, taken time to

reflect on what was important to them and questioned consumer culture. These people

weren’t sad people. They were happy, they felt free and were in control of their lives

and time. You see, the things that make us happiest are connections to others, a sense

of belonging to a community and place and opportunities to learn and grow. None of

these things require material wealth. They’re usually cheap or free and they have less

impact on the planet. As Art Buchwald once said “the best things in life aren’t things”