Webinar.
Sustainable Behavior Design

The frustration behind this work

My name is Jorn Craeghs, and this session is about sustainable behaviour design.

It starts from one frustration, which is honestly the reason I get up in the morning professionally: there are so many ideas for sustainability out there, and so little action.

It is frustrating to know that we could solve most of the world's big sustainability challenges with ideas that already exist, and yet those ideas are not embraced, bought, used or accepted nearly enough.

It is not that there is no interest. Concern is increasing and people genuinely have the intention to act sustainably. But there is an intention-action gap, and real action still happens far too rarely.

Ideas are not impact, behaviour is

Action means we actually have to do something. That makes behaviour the necessary link between an idea, whether an innovation, a product or a service, and actual impact in the world.

For anything to change, people have to make different choices and show different behaviour. Otherwise we are spreading ideas, and possibly enthusiasm, but not impact.

Three examples of the gap

Skin cancer. We have a preventative solution, and our supermarkets are not short of sun cream. But if we do not succeed in stimulating the behaviour of actually applying it before leaving the house, we make no impact. That behaviour still happens far too little.

Heat loss from a poorly insulated home. Numerous insulation solutions exist, and people are convinced insulation is worthwhile. But if we cannot get them to actually buy and fit draught strips, there is no impact. Very few people reach the point of doing it.

A bad company culture. The solutions offered are things like transparency and honesty, but those are abstract concepts. So we need to identify the actual behaviour we want. That might be giving constructive feedback after a meeting, which builds a habit or ritual of transparency. Without stimulating that specific behaviour, we are only circulating a concept.

This is why I founded a sustainable behaviour change agency: to focus on behaviour, so we can create real impact. I rely on insights from the behavioural sciences to work out why people are not acting sustainably and how we can change that.

Why there is so little action, the two systems

To answer that, I need to go into some basics of the behavioural sciences: the fields that explain how we make decisions consciously and subconsciously, spanning behavioural psychology, behavioural economics, sociology and anthropology.

The godfather of the field is Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2002 and who summarised his work with Amos Tversky in Thinking, Fast and Slow. The central idea is that we have two systems.

System one is fast thinking. It is automatic, always on, and it is what we call intuition or instinct. It uses very little energy. If the brain is a battery, system one barely draws on it. It is also subconscious, so we are not aware it is happening.

System two is slow thinking. It is on demand, so we have to activate it deliberately. It is our rational thinking, it consumes a lot of energy, and it is what we consciously perceive.

The genuinely groundbreaking finding is that system one takes up far more of our mental bandwidth. Much more of our thinking and decision-making happens subconsciously, and it dominates our behaviour.

The bear that works and the bear that does not

What does that mean for sustainability?

Imagine encountering a bear on a mountain path in the Dolomites. Your subconscious runs a checklist almost instantly. This is happening here. It is happening now, not in the future. It is personal, because I am on this path and the bear is there. It is a certain danger, because the bear is large with sharp teeth. And there is a clear enemy. Those checks trigger immediate behaviour: freeze, flee or fight.

Now consider the polar bear, the most-used image in sustainability communication, which we deploy precisely to motivate action.

Rationally it can persuade us. The problem is that system one is dominant, and system one concludes: this bear is far away. If that ice melts, it will be someday. This bear is someone else. It is uncertain whether this particular ice will melt. And who is the enemy?

In reality we all are, partly. But the subconscious cannot process that. Accepting it is nearly impossible, not rationally, but subconsciously.

Predictably irrational

This leads to the conclusion that humans are irrational. That sounds like a criticism, but it is a scientifically neutral statement: we do not think rationally all of the time, and even most of the time our thinking is shaped by irrational subconscious processes.

The good news for anyone trying to change behaviour is that we are increasingly predictably irrational. The more we learn about how decisions get made, the better we can work with it.

B = MAP, the three conditions for behaviour

This is where BJ Fogg, founder and director of the Stanford Behavior Design Lab, comes in. After twenty-five years analysing human behaviour he arrived at a formula: B = MAP. No behaviour will ever occur unless three elements are present at exactly the same moment.

Motivation can be high or low. It is driven first by intrinsic motivation, though we can add extrinsic motivation on top.

Ability means the behaviour has to be easy enough to do. Not only physically: also mentally, since people need to be able to process, remember and comprehend it.

Prompt, also called a trigger. Even with high motivation and an easy behaviour, nothing happens without a signal to act. Only with established habits does that trigger arise subconsciously and intrinsically. For every other behaviour, we have to be triggered externally.

Behaviour only happens when all three converge.

This is fundamental for engagement. If all we manage is to spark enthusiasm, we are only spreading ideas. Impact requires people to decide and act differently, which means asking how we can supply enough motivation, enough ability, and a prompt at the right moment, at both the rational and irrational level.

What follows are three barriers holding people back, one on each level of the formula, each with a booster for getting past it.

Barrier one, sustainable behaviour feels like a big leap

We tend to think in motivational terms and pay far too little attention to ability. Sometimes people are already reasonably motivated, and the behaviour simply needs to be easier.

Right now, acting sustainably is often hard, and more importantly it feels like a big leap.

Take meat. There are things we probably should stop doing altogether if we want to preserve life in the long run, and eating meat is one. But "stop eating meat" is, for many people, simply unimaginable. They can picture cutting down. Stopping feels like too large a jump to contemplate.

The alternative approach is sharing simple actions, the sort newspapers publish. De Morgen ran six simple tips on heating and energy efficiency: seal the gaps where air gets in, stop smoking and move more, use a blanket, hang thick curtains, use the residual heat in your kitchen. Modest actions, and yet they still feel overwhelming. Even sealing small air gaps becomes a big task inside a busy life with a demanding job.

Sustainable options are also frequently less available, less visible or less accessible. The big fast food chains have made real progress on plant-based options, but you still have to hunt through the menu to find them. The committed vegans and vegetarians will; nobody else will stumble across them at the bottom of a list.

So acting sustainably often is a big leap, and to our perception it almost always is.

Booster one, small steps

Make it smaller.

If the goal is for people to eventually stop eating meat, the message "less meat" works best. Research shows that "less meat" produces a larger and longer-lasting reduction in meat consumption than "eliminate meat" does. That is counterintuitive if you are campaigning to end meat consumption, but even then, "less meat now" is the smarter strategy.

This is about what we call the latitude of acceptance: what a person can currently imagine, and how far they think they can go. "Less meat" is imaginable sooner. And once someone is eating less meat, something else becomes imaginable, possibly eliminating it later.

Chunking

Even a small step like sealing air gaps can feel large, which is where chunking comes in: breaking a behaviour into its component sub-steps so it becomes mentally manageable.

"Fit draught strips in your home" sounds easy but remains a substantial task for many people. Broken into seven steps, from counting your windows, to planning the shopping trip, to cleaning the window surface, through to enjoying the warmth, it becomes something you can walk someone through. Prompting only the next small step has a far higher chance of getting the whole thing done than throwing the complete action at someone.

Physical defaults

Beyond making steps smaller, ask how to make sustainable behaviour the default.

People admire cycling culture in cities like Copenhagen and wonder how so many were persuaded to bike to work. Visit the parliament building and the answer is obvious: the bike parking sits closest to both the entrance and the exit. Cycling was deliberately made the logical physical option, which simultaneously made driving harder.

So ask how you can make the behaviour so easy it becomes the obvious choice.

Mental defaults

Defaults work mentally too. Sustainable options are usually framed as the alternative, with the unsustainable option as normal.

Burger King in Vienna inverted this. Order a Whopper there and you receive the plant-based version. If you want meat, you have to ask for it. That normalises the sustainable option and makes the unsustainable one the alternative.

Barrier two, negative social norms

Now the motivational level.

People may rationally understand a behaviour is unsustainable, but they look around and see plenty of others behaving unsustainably and treating it as perfectly normal. We all sit in traffic jams together. We eat meat at scale. We fly to distant destinations more than we probably should.

So the rational mind may object, while the subconscious observes how many people are doing it and concludes it must be normal. The subconscious consistently treats anything happening at scale as acceptable. That is a social norm, and here it is a negative one.

How our own campaigns make it worse

We sometimes make this worse ourselves.

We launch campaigns that spotlight the undesirable behaviour and attach a number showing how often it happens. The intention is good: make the problem feel big, create urgency, show the scale.

The rational message lands. But subconsciously, people register that if it happens that much, it must still be acceptable.

One campaign put it as: ah, one cigarette butt , heard forty million times a year. The aim was to dramatise cigarette butts ending up in the ocean. The behavioural science suggests the likelier effect is stimulating the behaviour, because the campaign normalises it.

Booster two, positive social norms

So do not spotlight the negative behaviour, or at least not its frequency. Spotlight the positive behaviour instead.

It helps to remember, as William Gibson put it, that the future is already here, it is just not evenly distributed. Sustainable behaviour is already happening; it simply is not dominant yet. The question is how to spotlight it and distribute it more evenly, mentally as much as physically.

Positive norms are contagious. People talk about the solar panel effect: the single best predictor of whether someone has solar panels is whether their neighbours do. Once panels start appearing in a neighbourhood, that neighbourhood very likely becomes solar-dominant. That is natural social norming at work.

Our job is to spotlight the behaviours that are not as visible as panels on a roof.

The towel experiment

One of the best-known experiments in stimulating ecological behaviour involved towel reuse in hotels, which saves water and detergent.

In the Phoenix area, three different messages were tested on the small bathroom signs:

1. Help save the environment.
2. Partner with us to help save the environment.
3. Join your fellow guests in helping to save the environment.

The third was 34% more effective than the first two at getting guests to reuse towels.

Why? Because we are social animals. Guests are not rationally reasoning that if others do it, they should too. Their subconscious scans the message and senses a norm: this is what is expected in this context, because others do it. That speaks to irrational thinking, and more people reuse the towel.

Opower, and a perverse effect worth knowing

Social comparison also drives energy efficiency. Opower, a sustainable energy provider, printed each household's energy use alongside their neighbours' on the bill.

Nobody wants to be the worst performer on the street, so households below average were motivated to improve.

But there was a perverse effect. Households told they were outperforming their neighbours started slacking, because they were already top of the street.

So they optimised it. The neighbour comparison went only to lower performers, while high performers received straightforward positive feedback: you are doing well, keep going. Different messages for different groups.

Making norms visible, and the wording that doubles uptake

There are creative ways to spotlight a new norm beyond testimonials and numbers. In China, electric vehicles get a different coloured licence plate. They do not become more numerous, but they become more noticeable, so you register them more often and your subconscious concludes there are more of them about.

Wording matters enormously too. In one experiment on plant-based choices with American consumers, the framing 30% of Americans reduce their meat consumption produced 17% choosing the plant-based option. The identical statistic phrased as 30% of Americans have now started to reduce their meat consumption doubled uptake to 34%.

The reason is that the second version signals a growing trend. The first implies a minority group that may always stay a minority. So when describing positive norms, stress the rising trend, so that even where a behaviour is not yet dominant, people understand it is becoming popular.

Barrier three, out-group messengers

Now the prompt level, and I want to explain an experiment first.

Participants watched videos of a hand being punctured by a needle, while researchers measured brain activity to gauge how much compassionate pain they felt. Only one variable changed: the colour of the wristband worn by the person being punctured, which participants were told indicated that person's religion, whether atheist, Hindu, Scientologist, Muslim, Jewish or Christian.

Participants always felt some compassionate pain. But they only felt it strongly when the person being punctured shared their own religion, their in-group. For someone from an out-group, they barely registered any.

That is a depressing finding, but we have to work with it. Subconsciously, people struggle to feel much empathy for those they perceive as outside their group.

It matters for how we trigger people, because we rarely have only a message. We have a messenger, and the messenger is the trigger. If someone is perceived as out-group, different, not sharing your values, we often do not pay attention at all. We do not even hear the message, so the trigger fails.

This is why Greta Thunberg is a superb messenger for some people and a poor one for others. If you perceive her as in-group, sharing your values, perhaps European, and you identify with that, she works. If you feel no connection, she is out-group and the message does not land. The same happens inside organisations, where some people will never be convinced because they feel no connection to whoever is speaking.

Booster three, in-group messengers

So think about who delivers the message.

Interesting research shows parents are most influenced on climate by their own children. Children are relatively neutral politically, since they often have no strong ideology yet, and parents care a great deal what their children think. That makes children close to ideal in-group messengers for opening the conversation.

The documentary The Game Changers does this deliberately. It targets athletes, who are a hard group to convince on plant-based eating because they have been told repeatedly that animal protein is what makes them strong and performant. The film delivers a different narrative through the words of elite athletes: Novak Djokovic in tennis, Lewis Hamilton in Formula One, and many others, demonstrating that plant-based food at minimum keeps you on par and may help you outperform.

So for engagement inside your organisation, ask not only what makes a good message but who makes a good messenger. To reach the people you are trying to reach, who is in-group? Are you, or are you out-group? Be honest about it, and look for in-group messengers who can carry it. If you cannot find one, work on becoming part of the in-group by emphasising interests or values you genuinely share.

Recap

We are all irrational beings, which is not a bad thing, but we do have to persuade the subconscious as well as the rational mind. Behaviour requires motivation, ability, and a prompt.

Three barriers stop people acting sustainably: it is perceived as a big leap, negative social norms suppress motivation, and out-group messengers mean people never even pay attention.

Three boosters: turn it into small steps, spotlight positive social norms, and use in-group messengers.

There are countless further insights in the behavioural sciences that I do not have time for today. One more worth naming is sharing stories of hope. There is already plenty of concern. That is why I launched Regenerative Futures with a co-founder, a biweekly newsletter sharing hopeful narratives and images of the future, to show how we might move forward differently.

Q&A, is a barrier a motivation problem or an ability problem?

An attendee asked how barriers relate to motivation: if motivation is high but barriers are high too, does motivation still count as high?

Barriers can sit on either level. A negative social norm is typically a motivational barrier, because we are subconsciously less motivated when unsustainable behaviour looks acceptable. But a behaviour not being the default, or requiring a very large step, is an ability barrier rather than a motivational one.

So it depends on the barrier, and identifying which axis it sits on tells you which booster to reach for.

Q&A, how do the boosters apply in large organisations?

Small steps. Start by identifying the actual behaviour you want. If you are working on culture, do not try to sell people the concept of transparency. Work out the concrete rituals and behaviours, for example giving each other open and honest feedback. Then keep going: break that into the smallest possible actions and campaign on those. Do not stop once you have defined a behaviour; break it down and walk people through it.

Positive social norms. Find out how far the norms you want already exist inside the organisation, then spotlight them. A large organisation is an advantage here, because there are simply more stories and examples to find.

In-group messengers. Large organisations contain many subcultures. Belonging to the same company does not make everyone in-group with each other. Some people will only be persuaded by someone from their own subculture, so have the modesty to look elsewhere in the organisation for the right messenger and put that person forward.

Closing

Engagement is only impactful when you are actually able to change choices and behaviour.

Good luck engaging people around sustainability.