Thread by @kristiansn89

🌎One of the most important research topics in #EnvironmentalPsychology is the link between pro-environmental behavior (PEB) and subjective wellbeing. Understanding and addressing this link will be crucial for realizing behavioral changes and adopting ambitious policies.🧵

A quick note: I rather dislike the term "pro-environmental behavior" because it refers more to the motivation behind behavior rather than its environmental impact. But this is a topic for another day, so I'll stick with PEB here for communication purposes 🙃

The expected wellbeing effect of PEB changes (obviously) matters to people and influences their willingness to change🙈

If people expect that changing behavior will involve significant reductions to their wellbeing, it's unlikely they will change it or support related policies.

Anecdotally, I'm writing up a study with @kuk_charlotte, @CameronBrick, @Sander_vdLinden, and others where perceived wellbeing effects were by far the strongest predictor of the perceived plasticity of changing climatically impactful consumer behaviors in the UK.

Despite this, the perceived wellbeing impacts of behavior change will vary greatly between behaviors, individuals, and contexts.

People have different economic, social, and physical circumstances that influence the perceived costs, difficulty, and wellbeing impacts of change.

PEB changes are widely framed as requiring a sacrifice to one’s current standard of living.

But this view is far too simplistic.

Research by @felixcreutzig et al. offers a key and hopeful counter-narrative showing that they can also improve wellbeing. nature.com/articles/s4155…

The sacrifice framing is often used to question the role of behavior change in tackling environmental problems. While I'm more hopeful, we should acknowledge that some people will have to change their behavior in a way that may be perceived as sacrificing (in the short term)

For example, some people will perceive adopting a plant-based diet🌱 or taking the train 🚅 instead of a plane as major sacrifices whereas others won’t.

Again, the perception of sacrifice depends on a person's sociocultural surroundings (e.g., norms around meat or consumption)

Within environmental psychology, the positive wellbeing aspects of PEBs are often (for good reasons) promoted. But @LauraKrumm has done some really interesting research showing that the links between PEBs and wellbeing differ depending on the environmental impact of the behavior.

Generally, the more time, costs, and effort required to change behavior, the lower the willingness to change it. For example, see Frank Geels's recent comment in @OneEarth_CP (which I mostly agree with).
researchgate.net/publication/37…

What is often overlooked is that wealthier individuals generally have an easier time changing behavior. The reason is that they can afford to outsource the process.

But this isn't always possible, as they will also have to curtail consumption behaviors (e.g., air travel).

However, curtailment (or avoidance) behaviors are often more difficult to change and maintain over time, especially when the behavior is cued and reinforced by existing structures and oftentimes seen as an indicator of social status (e.g., luxury goods).

sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

This aligns well with the findings of @ResulUmit, @wouterpoortinga et al. that income positively correlates with energy efficiency behaviors but negatively correlates with energy curtailment behaviors. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

DATA QUALITY. Most studies are correlational, which is a fine starting point and can offer valuable insights (e.g. @StuartBCapstick's paper).

But we need more longitudinal and causal evidence to better assess changes in behavior and wellbeing over time. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Using longitudinal methods will also allow us to examine whether people's perceptions (or forecasts) about the wellbeing impacts actually match their lived experiences post-behavior change. Much research suggests that people's affective forecasting skills aren't always great.

How can we overcome perceived negative wellbeing effects and increase the feasibility of impactful PEB changes? Three ideas:

1. Vocalize the counterfactual: that is, what happens if we don’t change behavior. This will indeed cause involuntary and undesirable behavior changes.

2. Share the experiences of people (to which they can relate) who have already made the change. Sometimes we just need to hear from others that the other side isn't all bad.

(Other researchers know much more about this than me🙂)

3. We should rally around a desirable societal narrative that most people want to subscribe to! We need to better communicate the importance of behavior change and promote domain-specific and systemic policies to make such change easier and offset negative wellbeing effects.

CONCLUSION. We already know that PEB changes need not undermine wellbeing and can sometimes even promote it. However, more and better evidence is still needed to understand how to promote PEBs, particularly in wealthier people.

While I didn't focus much on the link to policy support much, overcoming perceived wellbeing effects will surely help mobilize support for ambitious environmental policies as well.

Taken together, this only underscores the importance of this research topic moving forward🌎🌱

Finally, much more support is needed from policymakers and companies to facilitate collecting and accessing better data.

This will greatly help advance our understanding of the connection between PEB and subjective wellbeing and how to increase the feasibility of PEBs.