Sustaining Individual Engagement

0:09 hi 0:09 i'm sachi and i'm a graduate student at 0:11 the university of michigan 0:13 i'm here today with dr raymond deyoung 0:15 one of our faculty members at the 0:16 university and a leading researcher in 0:18 environmental psychology 0:20 we've asked dr deyoung to join us today 0:22 to give us some perspectives 0:24 on how we can continue to engage in 0:25 climate work over the long term 0:27 thanks for joining us today thank you as 0:30 you know 0:31 the students in our course have been 0:33 developing 0:34 actions that they can take to address 0:36 climate change as well as 0:38 working on their own personal climate 0:40 action plans for the next few months 0:42 now that the course is ending though 0:44 we're wondering based on your work on 0:46 durable behavior change how can our 0:48 learners make sure that they stay 0:50 active in this field i think that's a 0:52 big question that the field has been 0:54 struggling with for many decades so 0:56 i'm probably reflecting on many other 0:58 people's work not just my own 1:00 adorable behavior change has been a real 1:03 challenge for us 1:05 if the strategies were using back in the 1:07 60s and 70s worked as well as we 1:10 hoped they did and as we needed them we 1:12 wouldn't be here talking today 1:13 so it's caused us to look outside the 1:15 box a bit um 1:17 one of the strategies that we've 1:20 realized has been missing for a long 1:22 time is something called envisioning 1:24 um for to a large degree for a long time 1:27 now 1:28 we've encouraged students to learn how 1:30 to define problems um 1:32 work on solutions test them adopt them 1:35 into their own lifestyle get feedback 1:37 and then 1:37 improve all along the way but we haven't 1:40 really 1:41 gotten them to think about the world 1:43 that they'd like to live and they'd like 1:44 to inhabit 1:45 and it turns out that the envisioning 1:46 process is more complicated than we 1:48 imagined 1:50 a number of years ago danella meadows 1:52 who was one of the original authors of 1:54 the limits to growth 1:55 book back in 1972 1:58 presented a paper on envisioning 2:00 sustainability 2:02 and what she found was that academics 2:03 among all the different groups she 2:05 studied 2:06 had the worst time envisioning they 2:07 usually were problem oriented people 2:09 and they actually resisted the process 2:11 of envisioning what the world would look 2:12 like and 2:13 an example she gave it was a world 2:15 without hunger 2:16 but she imagined a world that had solved 2:18 climate change issues resource issues 2:21 toxic issues and she found that left 2:23 alone 2:24 academics and their students did a 2:26 horrible job at it 2:27 and so recently there's been a movement 2:29 afoot in psychology to develop what we 2:31 call a prospection psychology 2:33 how to get people to imagine futures 2:36 empathize with other people's views of 2:38 the future 2:40 kind of play with world views future 2:44 situations that they'd like to have 2:45 occur and then to 2:47 kind of move them from that future state 2:49 back to a series of 2:50 nearer term goals and then to work 2:53 toward picking behaviors as 2:55 tools or instruments to get to those 2:56 goals now this is exactly the opposite 2:58 of what a lot of models do they usually 3:00 end the model of behavior change they 3:02 imagine that the real purpose of the 3:04 whole 3:05 initiative is to get people to change 3:06 their behavior and i think it's still 3:08 true 3:09 but the behavior is only a way of 3:11 getting into a desirable future so 3:14 one thing i think students have to be 3:16 taught or have to practice is 3:18 this envisioning process and to be 3:19 honest we haven't done a lot of teaching 3:21 on it there's not a lot of 3:22 good guidelines or course work on it and 3:26 we're just beginning to develop some of 3:27 the 3:28 training techniques for it one of the 3:31 places in which we've 3:32 developed those is in the field of 3:34 clinical psychology where we do what's 3:35 called empathy training 3:37 getting people to empathize with others 3:39 or other states of mind or 3:41 another person so when people come to 3:42 reinvent themselves how do you 3:44 empathize with that new version of 3:46 yourself 3:48 the second thing we've learned to to do 3:50 is to 3:51 focus on satisfactions intrinsic 3:53 satisfactions 3:55 it turns out that we're much better 3:56 about motivating or changing behavior in 3:59 the short term 4:00 so education information processes 4:02 social norms 4:05 varies kinds of tangible monetary and 4:07 other kinds of incentives 4:08 do a great job of changing behavior but 4:10 the effect tends to fade 4:12 very quickly and we we know this 4:15 from a lot of research we also know it 4:18 from a century in psychology that 4:20 tended to focus only on short-term 4:22 behavior change 4:24 so we've kind of not developed a toolbox 4:27 of 4:28 long durable enduring easy to restart 4:32 behavior change techniques and so one of 4:34 the 4:35 strategies the one that i'm most closely 4:37 involved with is intrinsic 4:39 satisfaction a form of intrinsic 4:40 motivation it suggests that people can 4:44 adopt a behavior in order for them to 4:46 receive the kind of 4:48 internal sense of well-being that they 4:50 so 4:51 often desire and that well-being is not 4:53 being manipulated by someone else so 4:56 it's available to them 4:57 in the future and they can continue that 5:00 behavior 5:01 and continue to gain that intrinsic 5:03 satisfaction 5:05 we've been working on this and it turns 5:06 out that there's a number of different 5:08 kinds of intrinsic satisfactions that 5:10 are really relevant 5:11 for climate change issues other kinds of 5:13 behavior change 5:14 that involve environmental stewardship 5:16 one of them is a kind of satisfaction 5:19 from being 5:20 frugal or resourceful or clever 5:23 and people tend to just love that kind 5:25 of exploring 5:26 kind of discovery process they also tend 5:29 to get a lot of 5:30 internal satisfaction from doing things 5:33 that 5:34 matter that make a difference that 5:37 solve problems that have been sticky 5:39 that society is out of trouble 5:41 trouble with and in those situations 5:43 they're really getting a satisfaction 5:44 from 5:45 engagement or participation and the 5:48 third major category is something called 5:49 competence it turns out that people love 5:51 to discover new ways of doing things 5:53 they're always kind of geeked out about 5:56 discovering you know new techniques or 5:57 being clever at solving problems or 6:00 sharing solutions with people and they 6:02 get a real internal 6:04 kick from that kind of behavior so this 6:06 whole internal landscape is something 6:08 that 6:08 psychology ignored for a long time and 6:10 we've learned over the last 6:12 three or four decades as a major source 6:14 of enduring behavior change 6:16 and then the last thing we've been doing 6:17 is realizing too much of the focus has 6:20 been on one behavior 6:22 using energy efficient lights or 6:24 adopting 6:26 different transportation methods that 6:28 are less likely to emit emissions or 6:31 or have other kinds of pollutants and 6:33 while 6:34 each of these is important they're 6:36 together not sufficient 6:37 they're rarely enough to make a dramatic 6:41 difference 6:42 in the environment and so we've learned 6:44 to do is begin to package these things a 6:47 pattern of behaviors over a person's 6:49 life or 6:50 maybe not a life but a a week at least 6:54 if you can imagine that one of the 6:56 problems people have had is they get 6:58 tired of doing the same behavior over 7:00 and over again or 7:02 sometimes they do what's called a 7:04 rebound there's a process called 7:07 the rebound effect or jeven's paradox 7:09 where people are very efficient in the 7:10 short term 7:12 maybe they're highly efficient in 7:13 picking electrical lighting systems 7:16 but they feel like they're off the hook 7:18 for other behaviors 7:20 or they end up doing very efficient 7:22 lighting but they put in 7:23 far more lights than they ever had 7:25 before and in the end consume more 7:27 energy 7:28 well it's unlikely to get that kind of 7:29 rebound if the behaviors are 7:32 picked either to get you toward that 7:34 vision that i mentioned earlier 7:36 or if they're part of a package of 7:38 behaviors where 7:40 you wouldn't you wouldn't imagine 7:43 misbehaving in another domain just 7:45 because you behaved at home or at the 7:47 office 7:48 and so we we realized that packaging 7:50 these things as a 7:51 as a pattern of activities uh 7:55 ends up creating a more durable effect 7:57 and the other kind of last thing i'll 7:58 say is the other kind of packaging we do 8:00 is 8:00 is getting people together it rarely 8:03 works to have people 8:05 um pursue these things alone they end up 8:09 getting distracted there's lots of other 8:11 things going on in their lives 8:13 and they they often need help with other 8:16 people 8:16 so we've tried what are called 8:18 community-based strategies 8:20 approaches that form teams or 8:22 neighborhood groups 8:24 that both support one another and act as 8:27 sort of a 8:28 a norm developing um group where they 8:32 they begin to nudge each other a little 8:34 bit day to day and they'll 8:36 kind of call you out if you begin to 8:38 slip a little bit or laps 8:39 so the idea of having a rebound effect 8:41 or giving up on a behavior is less 8:44 likely on these community programs 8:46 can you i'm just trying to think of how 8:47 we might apply some of these 8:49 very broad concepts to the level of 8:52 coming up with concrete 8:54 actions that we're trying to take 8:55 ourselves when you think about 8:57 packaging actions creating patterns 9:00 creating habits 9:02 can do you have any examples of of 9:04 people who have done that with 9:05 climate-related 9:06 um actions sure a number of years ago we 9:09 used to do 9:09 a lot more work on pledges where we got 9:12 adults or children to 9:14 kind of look over the um i get adults or 9:17 children to look over 9:19 their behaviors over uh 9:22 period of time and then commit to 9:25 reducing 9:26 activity in different domains so be 9:28 maybe transportation energy use 9:30 food choices recreation and get them to 9:33 sign a pledge that said they were going 9:34 to reduce so many 9:36 either pounds of co2 or so many joules 9:38 of energy or something 9:40 but in the end what they were doing is 9:41 writing this little guide to themselves 9:43 that there are many different domains 9:45 that 9:45 they should be acting on and if they 9:48 aren't as successful in one of them they 9:50 can double down on another one of them 9:52 and so there's this sort of 9:53 packaging of their life life pattern 9:56 in in the group-based stuff there's a 9:59 lot of interesting work being done 10:01 in europe right now particularly western 10:03 europe where they have what are called 10:04 eco teams 10:05 these are neighborhood groups drawn from 10:08 across the community they usually engage 10:11 for 10:12 up to six to eight weeks working each 10:14 week through a workbook on different 10:16 topics like food or water 10:18 or energy and they're easily made up of 10:20 of 10:21 just normal citizens but under the 10:23 support of experts 10:25 the experts have to do something that's 10:27 very unique to experts they explain the 10:29 problem to people 10:30 and they provide some of the background 10:32 material but then they shut up 10:34 and it's very rare to get experts to 10:36 shut up um and so the people try small 10:38 experiments they go back to their 10:40 family or their or their workplace try 10:42 something and then the next week report 10:43 what worked or didn't 10:45 and sometimes they'll discover a 10:46 successful approach sometimes they have 10:48 something they want to share 10:49 often they find what fails and other 10:51 people know not to try that 10:52 but in this case you're forming a kind 10:54 of group or community-based approach 10:56 there's an academic version of this 10:58 called community-based social marketing 11:01 but it hasn't it's been used a lot in 11:03 communities but it's still 11:05 more of an academic approach while the 11:07 eco teams 11:08 has really gotten out into the 11:09 neighborhoods has worked successfully 11:11 there are other groups that do this 11:14 various eco villages transition towns 11:17 some eco some co-housing and eco 11:20 ecological housing programs 11:22 kind of work this into their standard of 11:24 living or 11:25 standard of behavior but um 11:29 so far those have been more they haven't 11:31 been done in a research framework so we 11:33 don't know if they work as well 11:34 we know that the eco teams in europe 11:36 have been actually studied enough to 11:38 we have a pretty good sense that they're 11:39 working well are there any takeaways 11:43 this might be stretching too far from 11:45 the way you presented these echo teams 11:46 is that you might have 11:48 only a six to eight week engagement and 11:50 that's kind of similar to what we're 11:52 thinking with this course where we've 11:54 been working with learners for about 11:56 seven weeks to take these actions 11:59 and now the course is ending are there 12:01 any lessons that we can draw from 12:03 maybe the eco team concept or other 12:06 experiments 12:07 of how we can continue to engage with 12:09 these issues 12:10 after sort of a finite end point sure i 12:13 mean it's a real that's really the going 12:14 back to the first question you had which 12:15 was about enduring or durable behavior 12:17 change because it's 12:18 you know while everything's in place 12:20 it's easy to do the behavior it's harder 12:21 to continue it on your own 12:23 so there's a couple of things we know 12:24 from the social grouping 12:26 these these eco team and and 12:28 neighborhood groups is that 12:30 they they often form relationships that 12:32 last beyond the research part of it or 12:34 the 12:34 activist part of it so long after the 12:38 researcher or the activist or the 12:39 practitioner has gone away 12:41 these groups continue to stay in touch 12:43 and in fact the the better groups now 12:44 are forming those kinds of networks as 12:46 part of these eco-team efforts 12:49 we know that social norms are very 12:50 powerful most people think that 12:52 individually they're not as affected by 12:54 social norms as everyone else is 12:57 but it turns out everybody is very 12:58 hyper-sensitive to it so the more we can 13:00 develop these networks of people 13:02 that stay in touch the more the behavior 13:04 will endure there have been a number of 13:07 long-term studies on on these kinds of 13:09 issues the long term would be 13:11 where the project lasts for six to eight 13:13 weeks and then you come back 13:15 and survey them or study them or observe 13:17 them a year later a year and a half 13:18 later one of them was done in 13:21 germany many years ago where they were 13:23 getting people to reduce their 13:24 consumption 13:25 something called source reduction they 13:27 weren't recycling as much as they were 13:29 just trying to reduce the total 13:30 throughput of materials 13:32 and they got people engaged in what we 13:34 would now call an eco-team approach 13:35 although it was called 13:36 just a research project back then and 13:39 then unbeknownst to the people they were 13:40 being monitored because the waste was 13:42 carefully controlled in this community 13:44 they were being monitored as long as 18 13:47 months later 13:48 and they not only what was fascinating 13:50 because not only maintain the same level 13:51 of participation they had 13:53 during the project they actually 13:54 increased it so their their behavior 13:56 continued to expand 13:58 which is which had been up until that 14:00 time unheard of 14:01 so we've got some long-term studies 14:03 there's a continuing interest in these 14:04 eco teams in europe 14:06 and they've continued to both 14:09 follow some of the original teams but 14:11 but more of the effort has been pushed 14:13 pushing it out into new communities but 14:16 one of the ways in which we think we can 14:18 increase this uh commitment to the 14:21 behavior 14:21 is to take the early members of these 14:24 efforts 14:24 and make them the mentors for the the 14:26 newer programs 14:28 and so you end up having this sort of a 14:30 i wouldn't quite call it an expert since 14:32 the citizens don't want to be called 14:34 experts but 14:35 the the early adopters or the people 14:37 who've tried it and so they can give a 14:39 little bit of a 14:40 head start for the newer group and also 14:43 there's then greater commitment to that 14:44 mentor that they feel as though 14:46 their involvement is is worthwhile is 14:49 genuine so we go back to that intrinsic 14:51 satisfaction 14:52 they now are doing something that 14:53 matters in the long run that will make a 14:55 difference 14:56 and so the more we can do this multi 14:58 stage and 14:59 it's not quite right to call it 15:00 multi-generation since it doesn't last 15:01 long but 15:02 different stages and bring mentoring 15:04 along the better we'll be 15:05 and that idea has been very popular in 15:07 sociology 15:09 uh social psychology but it hasn't yet 15:12 been 15:13 adopted to a large degree in in the 15:15 practitioner kind of stuff we do in 15:17 environmental stewardship 15:18 but as i say it's starting to be used in 15:20 europe and in a few places here in 15:22 the states okay so that actually 15:25 brings me to my next question for you 15:26 because as i think about 15:29 maybe an individual who went through 15:31 this process once and gained all of this 15:33 knowledge about how to act 15:35 and is now thinking about paying it 15:36 forward and continuing 15:38 their new behaviors while bringing 15:40 someone else along with them teaching 15:41 someone else 15:42 you know what the process looks like um 15:46 one of the things we're actually worried 15:48 about is that 15:49 when you engage too deeply in something 15:53 like this you can 15:54 get burned out and i think i've actually 15:56 i think you said something in class like 15:57 burned out people 15:58 can't save the world or something to 16:01 that effect 16:02 could you just talk about that a little 16:03 bit and maybe give us 16:05 some ideas for how you avoid the pitfall 16:07 of getting 16:08 over committed and burned out with a big 16:10 issue like this i think i think it's a 16:12 major problem it's not just 16:13 environmental issues it's any kind of 16:14 major social issue 16:16 and we know that people do burn out we 16:18 have lots of people who 16:20 have to take retreats have to take time 16:22 off and all and so one of the efforts in 16:24 environmental stewardship 16:25 behavior change programs is to prevent 16:27 that kind of burnout and 16:29 it involved us uh involved researching 16:31 it involved us going back into the 16:33 literature on intentional resources so 16:36 to explain it i have to explain one kind 16:37 of attention which we're all using right 16:39 now to to follow this conversation 16:41 it's called directed attention and the 16:43 capacity to direct attention is a 16:46 is a unique attribute of human 16:49 information processing 16:50 it also happens to be something that 16:51 fatigues so at the end of this 16:53 conversation you and i will have less of 16:55 it the end of people watching this 16:56 they'll 16:57 have less of it end of a hard day the 16:58 end of a hard week it'll be even less of 17:00 it 17:01 and when you have mental fatigue this 17:03 sort of lack of mental vitality 17:05 there's a lot of things that happen that 17:06 are bad you get irritable 17:08 you snap at people you look on the dark 17:10 side of things 17:12 you're more likely to take offense you 17:14 can't follow through on anything you 17:16 lose track of things you lose 17:18 track of of your strategy of your plan 17:20 of your 17:21 of your schedule you're also unwilling 17:23 to start new behaviors which of course 17:24 is a big thing in conservation behavior 17:26 change 17:27 so we we realized that this fatigue was 17:29 a major problem um 17:32 we know from some studies in the in the 17:34 field of cognitive psychology that 17:36 when we look at different populations 17:39 those people who spent more time in 17:40 nature 17:42 actively engaged in observing or walking 17:46 through 17:46 or working in nature tend to have more 17:50 mental rest more mental vitality than 17:53 those who 17:55 recreate in other ways or rest in 17:57 different ways 17:58 and from an evolutionary psychology 18:00 point of view we realized that people 18:02 when we were evolving the different 18:03 information processing systems 18:06 people probably had to use directed 18:07 attention a lot less 18:09 other kinds of attention sufficed 18:12 and at the same time if they needed to 18:14 restore nature was 18:15 literally an arm's length away so it's 18:17 very easy to get restoration 18:19 and jump to today we have exactly the 18:21 opposite where a large amount of what we 18:23 do 18:24 uses this kind of attention to work in 18:27 crowded areas on complex abstract ideas 18:30 climate change has got to be one of the 18:31 big abstract concepts 18:33 over long periods of time depletes 18:35 directed attention 18:36 and yet restoration is not easy it's not 18:39 just an armed length away we have to 18:41 plant it into our schedule we have to 18:43 seek out these environments 18:45 and so we realized early on that 18:48 mental vitality rested directed 18:51 attention 18:52 was likely a precondition to trying new 18:55 behaviors to sticking with a project 18:58 basically to not get burned out and so a 19:00 lot of the projects i have my students 19:02 work on i encourage them to include some 19:04 kind of restorative activity and 19:06 it can be some kind of mindfulness based 19:08 stress reduction 19:10 yoga meditation more likely it's a walk 19:13 in the woods 19:13 so we have a conference at a retreat or 19:16 a workshop 19:17 near an outdoor park we try to get 19:19 people to take walks before 19:21 and sometime in the middle of a 19:22 conference to get them more arrested 19:25 we've done large numbers of small 19:26 experiments that prove that people do a 19:28 lot better they're more creative 19:30 they're less contentious uh they like 19:33 the experience more 19:34 and they're more likely to respond 19:36 afterwards that the experience was 19:37 useful and find themselves actually 19:39 putting the stuff into practice the 19:41 behavior change or the or the 19:42 educational strategies or motivational 19:44 strategies 19:45 so we have some short-term evidence of 19:47 that we also know that from the 19:49 communities these eco-team 19:51 examples or the the eco villages or the 19:54 co-housing 19:55 that those communities that have more 19:58 nature nearby 20:00 more of a sustainable agricultural focus 20:03 or large large scale gardening the 20:05 people tend to 20:06 stick with the behavior changes tend to 20:08 stay with the community's 20:10 uh plans and policies much much better 20:13 than those communities that 20:14 are more social in their engagement so 20:17 their 20:17 their community activity won't be 20:19 agricultural or native 20:20 natural nature focused rather than being 20:23 nature focused those activities would be 20:26 into social issues where they're 20:28 continuing to have to work with very 20:30 abstract ideas and with difficult 20:32 situations 20:33 uh further depleting attention so we 20:35 have this kind of evidence of small 20:37 large numbers of natural small 20:38 experiments going on that say that this 20:40 this resource is very important so my 20:43 advice to the students would be 20:44 you know don't don't worry about the 20:46 fact that directed attention gets 20:48 fatigued 20:48 it's natural it's what you what you do 20:51 when you're working really hard on 20:52 something that's really important is you 20:54 get brain dead 20:56 but work into your schedule some kind of 20:58 restorative activities walks in the 20:59 woods 21:01 take up some activity like bird watching 21:05 if you're going to take runs or other 21:06 kinds of exercise try to work through 21:08 wooded areas try to 21:10 be near water and then also just take 21:13 more time out during the day to stare at 21:15 nature or 21:16 to just reflect a little bit to slow 21:18 down the other piece of advice we give 21:20 them is that 21:21 the directed attention we have is finite 21:24 and so if you are 21:25 have a large number of distractions 21:27 during the day 21:29 you're going to have more fatigue than 21:32 you would have otherwise 21:33 so the distractions can be anything from 21:36 cell phones interrupting you 21:38 trying to study in a noisy environment a 21:40 coffee shop is a great example everyone 21:41 loves to go to a coffee shop and 21:43 study while while drinking coffee or tea 21:46 but it tends to be a terrible 21:47 environment for actually 21:49 managing your directed attention 21:50 capacity because you're 21:52 constantly having to be using that 21:54 attention to bring yourself back to the 21:55 task at hand because there's so many 21:57 interruptions 21:58 so many noises so many people so many 22:00 movements and such so 22:02 if you can reduce the distractions if 22:04 you can be in environments that are less 22:07 vibrant less less noisy less exciting 22:11 some of the time then you're going to be 22:13 able to work with whatever directed 22:14 attention you have longer 22:16 and be less irritable therefore the 22:18 group work that you're doing is going to 22:19 be 22:20 more rewarding for you and particularly 22:21 for everybody else 22:23 that's perfect um i think i just have 22:26 one more question for you 22:28 and we're asking all of our experts to 22:29 give us 22:31 um one action that if our learners were 22:34 only able to do 22:35 one thing take one action make one 22:37 change to address climate change 22:40 what do you think that action should be 22:42 and why 22:43 just one now i'd probably say plant a 22:46 garden 22:48 okay it gives you the it gives you a 22:51 number of things it gives you some 22:53 nature restoration so you're going to 22:55 get directed attention 22:57 restored it really puts you into a 23:01 position where 23:02 you're not in control anybody who 23:04 gardens knows that you don't 23:05 you don't control the growth of plants 23:08 you facilitate it or you encourage it 23:12 local food consumes a lot less energy 23:16 in terms of transportation and 23:17 processing and storage than 23:19 food from any distance easily it's 23:22 something that gets the neighbors 23:23 interested in so you have the 23:24 possibility of 23:26 sharing what you've just done with 23:28 either young kids in the neighborhood or 23:30 or adults so you have the opportunity to 23:33 have conversations about nature and 23:35 about food and about energy 23:39 and there have been very few negative 23:41 consequences of gardening so it's not 23:43 like there's going to be some kind of a 23:44 rebound effect where 23:47 we don't have any evidence that people 23:48 who garden tend to consume more energy 23:50 or 23:51 tend to travel more or anything like 23:52 that so i'd say plant a garden 23:54 that's perfect thank you so much for 23:56 being here with us today dr deyoung it's 23:58 been really helpful to get your ex 24:00 perspective on some of these issues of 24:02 behavior change thank you very much