• Energy Research

Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting behavioral task. Across 59,440 participants from 63 countries, the interventions’ effectiveness was small, largely limited to nonclimate skeptics, and differed across outcomes: Beliefs were strengthened mostly by decreasing psychological distance (by 2.3%), policy support by writing a letter to a future-generation member (2.6%), information sharing by negative emotion induction (12.1%), and no intervention increased the more effortful behavior—several interventions even reduced tree planting. Last, the effects of each intervention differed depending on people’s initial climate beliefs. These findings suggest that the impact of behavioral climate interventions varies across audiences and target behaviors.

Promoting energy conservation in university dormitories is challenging because student residents are typically charged a flat utility fee. One possibility to curb excessive energy use in the absence of monetary incentives is to highlight the environmental consequences of energy use. However, it is still largely unknown how these consequences should be communicated to effectively change people’s behavior. In the present study, we analyzed the effect of framing the environmental consequences of energy use in terms of losses versus gains on the air-conditioner use of student residents of a Japanese university dormitory. A total of 330 students were provided with stickers to attach to the air-conditioner remote control in their dormitory room during the winter term. The stickers conveyed that increasing the temperature will hurt the environment (loss frame), that reducing the temperature will protect the environment (gain frame), or that changing the temperature will affect the environment (neutral frame). Day-to-day variations in objective air-conditioner use data were analyzed as a function of experimental condition to examine the effect of message framing. The change in air-conditioner use from pre-intervention to intervention period did not differ between experimental groups and neither did the change from pre-intervention period to a period after the intervention.

Controlled experimentation is critical for understanding the causal determinants of pro-environmental behavior. However, the potential of experimental pro-environmental behavior research is limited by the difficulty to observe pro-environmental behavior under controlled conditions. The Pro-Environmental Behavior Task (PEBT) was developed to address this limitation by facilitating the experimental analysis of pro-environmental behavior in the laboratory. Previous studies in Belgian samples have already supported the validity of the PEBT as a procedure for the study of actual pro-environmental behavior. Here, we aimed for a cross-cultural replication of this finding in a sample of N = 103 Japanese college students. Along the lines of previous studies, we found PEBT choice behavior to be sensitive to within-subject manipulations of its behavioral costs and environmental benefits. This implies that participants take these consequences into account when choosing between PEBT options. In addition, we showed, for the first time, that such consequence effects can also be detected in a less powerful between-subjects design. These results support the generality of consequence effects on PEBT choice behavior as well as the validity and utility of the PEBT for use in samples from different cultural backgrounds.

Human behavior is the main driver of environmental degradation and climate change [...]