Determinants of individual energy- relevant decisions and behaviours: A multiple systems approach

Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent as the climate changes. NASA captured this image of Hurricane Dorian from the International Space Station on September 2, 2019, as the storm churned over the northwestern Bahamas. ©NASA

Bringing our biases to the surface Many of us would agree that it’s important to reduce our individual energy consumption in the context of wider concern about sustainability and climate change, yet this doesn’t always translate into concrete action. Our emotions may play a major role in our decisions on energy consumption, a topic central to Professor Tobias Brosch’s research.

The development of new technologies and renewable sources of energy is a central part of efforts to deal with climate change, yet this on its own is unlikely to be enough to meet sustainability targets. Alongside technical development, changes in individual behaviour are essential if we are to deal with climate change effectively, believes Tobias Brosch, Professor of Psychology at the University of Geneva. “A substantial degree of behaviour change will be needed from everybody,” he says. However, while there is a growing awareness of climate change among the wider public, this does not always translate into action on the individual level.

“People are starting to become more aware of the reality – climate change is happening – but still do little to translate this into concrete behavioural change,” outlines Professor Brosch.

There are several different reasons for this, beyond questioning the scientific basis of climate research. One important factor is

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Human behaviour and CO2 emissions are inextricably linked. The excessive use of airplanes is just one major factor contributing to greenhouse gas emissions, which are now having a palpable impact on the global environment.

Despite ups and downs from year to year, global average surface temperature is rising. By the beginning of the 21st century, Earth’s temperature was roughly 0.6 degrees Celsius above the long-term (1951–1980) average. (NASA figure adapted from Goddard Institute for Space Studies Surface Temperature Analysis.)

that the human brain is not really designed to process information around climate change; our ancestors dealt with challenges in the here and now, things that could be touched, felt or seen, whereas climate change is presented in terms of statistics and forecasts about the future. “There are long-term trajectories of temperature change that we cannot capture with our senses,” points out Professor Brosch.

This is not to suggest that humans do not consider the long-term consequences of their actions, but this may not come as naturally as thinking about the more immediate effects.

“We tend to discount things that might happen 50 or 100 years in the future, to focus on more immediate concerns,” continues Professor Brosch.

A second major issue is the sheer scale of the challenge around climate change. There can be a tendency for individuals to think that their own actions will have little impact in the wider global context, and that it is up to governments and large organisations

to take action. “This is a second problem – that individuals evade responsibility,” says Professor Brosch. These are areas of deep interest to Professor Brosch, who is the Principal Investigator of a research project probing deeper into the basis on which individuals make decisions about energy consumption. “We look at global questions, like why are some people still not concerned about questions around climate change and the potential consequences?” he outlines.

“We also look at more concrete issues, like what interventions can we develop to help people consume less energy?”

Energy decisions Research in this area has previously focused on mechanisms that are consciously accessible to people when making energyrelated decisions, such as knowledge, values and attitudes. However, Professor Brosch says that automatic, unconscious mechanisms also exert a considerable influence on these

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decisions. “We have shown that both implicit biases and more conscious factors, like your values, influence your purchasing decisions,” he explains. One major aim of the project is to build a more complete picture of the decision-making process, including these implicit biases. “We use neuroscience to look directly at the decision-making process as it happens in the brain. We are trying to develop a perspective that takes into account multiple decision-making systems in the sustainability domain,” says Professor Brosch.

This encompasses several different strands of research, one of which centres around looking at the neural mechanisms involved in processing information about climate change. Much of this information is presented in terms of how the climate will evolve in future. “We know how the brain operates when you think about the future: you use your knowledge of the past to construct a simulation of this future. A region of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is involved in constructing these simulations,” says Professor Brosch.

One reason why people might differ in their concern about the consequences of climate change is their ability to construct these future situations, a topic Professor Brosch and his colleagues in the project are exploring. “We put people in a scanner, and we showed them potential consequences of climate change,” he outlines.

These consequences included, for instance, a certain level of temperature change by a given point in the future, or the potential for higher levels of social conflict and more mass migration events. Some of these consequences were set to occur far into the future, while others were projected to occur much sooner, within the lifetime of the individual themselves. “We asked people how worried they were by these consequences and we measured their brain activity. We found that activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex was related to the extent to which

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Above: Climate change affects our living environment: More than a year of drought has dropped lake and reservoir levels in central Texas by tens of feet.

September 2010 through September 2011 were the driest 12 months on record for much of the region, with rainfall at 30 to 40 percent of the norm.

NASA Earth Observatory image created by Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon, using Landsat data provided by the United States Geological Survey. Caption by Michael Carlowicz.

people were worried about the consequences of future climate change,” explains Professor Brosch. “This suggests that these people who are better able to create mental simulations of the future are also more concerned about the consequences of climate change.”

Researchers are also working to present these consequences to the wider public in a more tangible, concrete way, and to bring home the possible impact of climate change.

is to investigate how emotions influence individual decisions on energy consumption.

“We wanted to identify the different emotional profiles that people experience in the context of environmental actions.

We found differences in the extent to which people feel positive emotions when they do something environmentally-friendly,” explains Professor Brosch. People may feel a burst of pride when they recycle correctly, for example, while Professor Brosch says there are also differences in the extent to which we feel negative emotions when we do something that harms the environment.

“That might be shame or guilt when you take the plane for a week-end trip, or when you use your car instead of the bike,” he says.

We look at global

questions, like why are some people still not concerned about questions around climate change and the potential consequences?

There is a tendency to think that climate change will only affect future generations, so it’s important to make climate change as relevant as possible to our everyday lives, a prime motivation behind a new project that Professor Brosch and his colleagues have recently started. “We’re creating a simulation of how Geneva will look in 2070 or 2080, once those consequences have become more tangible. We’re using virtual reality to help create those simulations,” he explains.

This would essentially be a full immersion in a Geneva feeling the full effects of climate change. “It’s about translating the statistics into something that is personally relevant to the individuals themselves,” continues Professor Brosch.

A deeper awareness of the likely consequences of climate change may prompt people to take action themselves, another area of interest in the project. One aim here

The researchers found that different types of emotional reactivity were related to different energy-relevant actions. Based on a sample of 5,000 Swiss households, they showed that people who tend to feel strong positive emotions were more likely to invest in energy-efficiency. “These people were more likely to change their electricity tariff to a more expensive, but greener tariff. Feelings of pride that you invest in something for the future seem to increase willingness to take action,” outlines Professor Brosch. On the other hand, the tendency to feel negative emotions was related to curtailment behaviour, so using less resources. “In general people who are more prone to this negative reactivity have a lower electricity bill,” says Professor Brosch.

“We found it very interesting to observe a disassociation between positive and negative emotional reactivity and different kinds of environmental actions.”

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Determinants of individual energyrelevant decisions and behaviours: A multiple systems approach Project Objectives

Climate change is a major issue across the world, and a lot of effort is focused on dealing with it. While technological development will have a crucial role to play, individuals will also need to change their behaviour in order to reduce the amount of energy they consume.

The aim of the project is to develop a deeper understanding of the factors and mechanisms that influence individual decisions and behaviours on energy consumption and sustainability. This will then form the basis for the development of targeted interventions designed to reduce energy demand.

A great deal of behavioural research has previously focused on explicit, consciously accessible determinants of judgments and decisions, such as individual values, attitudes, or norms. Researchers in the project also take into account more automatic decision-making mechanisms including emotional reactions and implicit associations.

Researchers are combining explicit measures with implicit cognitive, psychophysiological, and neuroscientific measures to better understand the interplay of different determinants of sustainable decisions. The goal is to develop a multiple system approach to sustainable decision making.

Project Funding

“Determinants of individual energy-relevant decisions and behaviours: A multiple systems approach”, AP Energy Grant PYAPP1_160571 from the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Contact Details

Prof. Tobias Brosch University of Geneva Department of Psychology, Consumer Decision and Sustainable Behavior Lab Boulevard du Pont d’Arve 40, CH-1205 Geneva T: +41 (0) 22 379 92 23 E: tobias.brosch@unige.ch W: https://www.unige.ch/fapse/decisionlab/

Professor Tobias Brosch

Professor Tobias Brosch studied psychology at the Universities of Trier and Canterbury before obtaining a PhD at the University of Geneva. He completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at New York University and then worked as lecturer and senior lecturer at the University of Geneva. In 2015, he was appointed Assistant Professor at the University of Geneva where he founded the Consumer Decision and Sustainable Behavior Lab. In 2019, he was promoted to Associate Professor and now holds the chair for Psychology of Sustainable Development.

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Emotions – as expressed here in the faces of the protesters – may play a major role in motivating sustainable behaviour. Sydney, Australia - March 15, 2019 - 20 000 Australian students gather in climate change protest rally, School Strike 4 Climate, and demand urgent action on climate change.

Interventions The wider picture here is ongoing concern about the sustainability of current consumption patterns, which has led to a lot of interest in designing interventions to promote reductions in energy consumption.

Professor Brosch and his colleagues have been working on a ‘soft’ intervention in the context of the so-called energy efficiency gap, which refers to the fact that it is actually quite irrational not to invest in energy efficient technology, despite the upfront cost.

“By initially investing you can save money in the long run, and also help protect the environment. So there are lots of advantages, but people don’t do it as much as economists would predict that a rational person would,” he explains. This is another important aspect of Professor Brosch’s research. “What subtle changes can we introduce so that people take those considerations more into account when making their decisions?” he asks.

The way in which energy-related information is presented is one important consideration in this respect. One reason why many people fall into the energy efficiency gap, and choose not to invest in energy efficient technology, is the way information is presented. “If you see for example that a fridge saves 15 percent energy compared to the standard model, this also means that you reduce CO2 emissions, so it’s good for the planet. This also means that you save a certain amount in energy costs,” explains Professor Brosch. These benefits are not necessarily made explicit to consumers at the moment of their purchase decision however, so Professor Brosch is working on an intervention strategy called attribute translations. “The idea of attribute translations

is that we present this information explicitly at the moment of choice, so people can immediately see the extent to which emissions would be reduced and how much money they would save every year,” he says.

Initial findings show that this intervention could have a significant impact in terms of encouraging people to move towards energyefficient technologies, and Professor Brosch is looking forward to applying some of the ideas and models that have been developed in the project. He and his team are collaborating with electricity providers and international organisations like the UN and the World Economic Forum, with the wider goal of helping reduce overall energy consumption and promoting sustainable behaviour. “We are discussing how we can move towards getting our results into the field faster,” outlines Professor Brosch. Alongside this work, Professor Brosch is also keen to pursue further research into the mechanisms behind human decision-making with respect to sustainability.

“We are going to continue these research lines with follow-up projects,” he says.

The Campus Biotech building of the University of Geneva, where the project is located. The Campus is within walking distance of the United Nations, facilitating collaborations with international organisations.

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