It is called a mega study and not without reason. More than 250 researchers were involved and almost 60,000 people from 63 countries participated.
“Of course we wanted to contribute to such a big and important project,” says Lina Koppel, postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Management and Engineering at Linköping University. “Simple interventions to change people’s behaviour have been very influential in many domains. This project compared a range of interventions in the domain of climate change, one of today’s most pressing issues.”
International cooperation
The study, that is published in the journal Science Advances, tested the effectiveness of eleven interventions on four outcome measures: belief in climate change, support for climate policy, willingness to share a message about climate change on social media, and effort exerted in a computer-based tree-planting task.
The mega study was led from New York University in the USA, but researchers around the world have been involved in influencing its design and collecting data. Unlike most previous studies, this one was also carried out in countries outside the rich, industrialised part of the world. Together with colleagues Daniel Västfjäll and Gustav Tinghög at LiU and researchers from Karolinska Institutet, Lina Koppel has contributed data from Sweden.
No universal method
So, what did the researchers find? Did they find any universal methods to make people behave in a more climate-friendly way?
Well, it is much more complicated than that.
In order to increase belief in climate change, it was, for example, most effective to show consequences of climate change in people’s immediate surroundings. To increase support for climate policy measures, it was better to let them write to future generations, while none of the interventions increased the willingness to make an extra effort for the sake of the climate.
But across interventions, the effects were quite small and no single one was the best at everything. Much depended on participants’ initial climate beliefs and effects also varied across countries.
"Different measures work differently well in different contexts. They need to be designed with the target audience and target behaviour in mind,” says Lina Koppel.
Aid for opinion leaders
As a way to deal with the varying results, the researchers have built a web service where you can test the effect of different measures based on a variety of variables: country, political ideology, gender, age, education and more. It can be an aid to opinion leaders in choosing the best method for different contexts.
But researchers question whether simple efforts at grassroots level is enough. Rather, the results suggest that large-scale policy decisions may be more important.
“Simple interventions at the individual level will not solve the entire climate crisis. But they can be used to support bigger changes,” says Lina Koppel.
Article: Addressing climate change with behavioral science: A global intervention tournament in 63 countries, M Vlasceanu et al, Science Advances, published online 7 February, doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adj5778
