The Psychology of Pro-Environmental Communication

Beyond Standard Information Strategies

Christian A. Klöckner

• Éditeur: Palgrave Macmillan
• Année: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137348326
• Sujet: Social Sciences
• Sous-sujet: Media Studies

The environment is part of everyone's life but there are difficulties in communicating complex environmental problems, such as climate change, to a lay audience. In this book Klöckner defines environmental communication, providing a comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of the issues involved in encouraging pro-environmental behaviour.

Part I

1

What Is Environmental Communication and Why Is It Important?

Chapter summary

This chapter addresses the question of why environmental communication is an indispensable part of environmental strategies. Disciplinary views like environmental economics, environmental sociology, or environmental governance are briefly presented and contrasted to the psychological perspective to gain a comprehensive understanding of the complexity of the topic and the psychological perspective this book is taking. Different forms of communication are outlined (e.g. direct person-to-person; mediated communication via telephone, videophone, print media, TV, radio, or Internet) and their characteristics described. Communication behaviour is contrasted with other forms of human behaviour. The question of how far communication has to include intentionality, or if communication also includes unintended behaviour, is addressed. Furthermore, the difference between verbal and non-verbal communication is outlined. The chapter concludes with a discussion of which understanding of communication is most helpful for the topic at hand, that of describing, understanding, and designing pro-environmental communication strategies. Based on this discussion, a working definition of pro-environmental communication is presented.

1.1 Introduction

As this book addresses the topic of environmental communication, this first chapter has a number of functions. First, it serves to demonstrate that environmental communication is necessary to tackle the environmental problems our societies face and that communication is an essential part of changing societies towards more sustainability. This will be done by placing environmental communication in a context of engineering, economics, sociology, governance, and psychology. Second, communication behaviour needs to be critically analysed along the lines of three dimensions: which forms of communication exist, how is communication different from other types of human behaviour, and what is the difference between verbal and non-verbal communication. Based on these considerations, an attempt will be made to define environmental communication in a way that benefits understanding of this specific type of behaviour for the remainder of this book.

1.2 Why is environmental communication necessary?

Our societies have, through history, been challenged by many different environmental problems such as deforestation, pollution, biodiversity loss, climate change, acidification of the oceans, and depletion of the ozone layer. Two main streams of approaches can be taken to tackle such problems. One is developing new, cleaner, or more efficient technology, thus trying to fix the problem with technological solutions which usually do not imply severe changes in people’s behaviour. The other is trying to influence people to reduce damaging behaviours or to shift to alternative, less damaging behaviours. Although the two streams seem to be distinctive at first glance, they have considerable overlap. A binding element in all approaches is that they all depend on environmental communication in one form or another.

1.2.1 The technology-centred approach

When chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) from refrigerators are depleting the ozone layer, engineers must come up with new, less damaging replacements. When carbon dioxide emissions contribute to climate change, new or alternative technologies that improve efficiency and do not rely on fossil fuel need to be developed. When combustion engine cars are a huge environmental problem, then more efficient cars or alternative fuel cars might be a solution. The number of examples in this line of thinking is almost infinite. However, in recent years, a shift from the belief in technology as the prime solution to environmental problems towards behaviour- and lifestyle-centred strategies has occurred (Chapman, 2007). This has several reasons. Some believe that long-term technological progress might be too slow to achieve the necessary reduction in environmental pollution to prevent severe consequences, so short-term behaviour change is necessary (Anable & Shaw, 2007). Another reason is that technological solutions which are not changing people’s way of living are often not effective enough to address the environmental problem. Recently, Mitchell (2012) concluded that most scientific and political debates about mitigating climate change are dominated by “technophilic optimism”, the belief that technology will save the world, and that this belief is contributing to missing the necessary targets. He argues that more radical societal changes including constraining population growth and reducing consumption are necessary to have an effect large enough to be helpful.

Another aspect is the well-documented rebound effect of efficiency technology. The rebound effect is a concept originating from economic research, with Berkhout, Muskens, and Velthuijsen (2000) defining it as an increase in demand caused by price reductions through efficiency increase. If, for example, cars become more fuel efficient, the demand for fuel to achieve the same product (a driven mile) is reduced. This reduces the fuel price which then in turn increases demand because people can afford to drive more. Usually, such economic rebound effects tend to “eat up” at least parts of the benefits of efficiency improvements (Berkhout et al., 2000). Besides this direct economic rebound, psychological rebound effects have also been shown. Klöckner, Nayum, and Mehmetoglu (2013) have shown that people who bought an electric vehicle not only used it more, but also felt less responsible for the negative environmental effects of car use, which are related not only to direct emissions from the car, but also to the use of space or the production of the car. Furthermore, a study of people exchanging electric resistance heaters with much more energy-efficient air-to-air heat pump technology in Denmark has shown that a large fraction of the technological saving potential was not achieved, because people changed their heating behaviour after installation, such as heating more rooms, having higher room temperatures, or using the heat pump for air conditioning during summers (Gram-Hanssen, Christensen, & Petersen, 2012).

It can be concluded that a technology-centred approach to environmental problems is in most cases not sufficient to eliminate the environmental problem. It needs to be combined with behaviour change to be effective, as new technologies are slow to develop, and this technology-centred approach tends to create rebound effects. Behaviour change requires communication activities, and even in the rare cases where technology actually is the solution to the problem, communication is crucial. Technological change is rarely enforced by law, with the effect that the decision to adopt new technologies is up to the consumer. This implies that some kind of marketing activities or promotion campaigns is necessary to make consumers likely to adopt the clean technology.

1.2.2 Environmental economics

Environmental economics asserts that conservation of natural resources and reduction of environmental pollutants are connected to their price. Unfortunately, the prices of consumer goods often do not adequately reflect the price that society as a whole pays for their use, which in environmental economics is referred to as a market failure (Hanley, Shogren, & White, 2007). Thus, scarce resources are not used in a way where society benefits most. The societal costs of the product use are externalised. Typical solutions for such problems from an economic perspective are either regulating the resource use or the emission and enforcing fines if regulations are not followed, or including the externalised price in the product’s price, for example, via emission fees.

Even though environmental economics mostly deals with macroeconomic problems, this way of thinking can also be applied to individual microeconomics. From this perspective, an individual will choose the most beneficial alternative. This can also include non-monetary benefits (Frank, 1997). If the costs do not adequately reflect all societal costs of the behaviour, then this evaluation process is biased towards environmentally damaging behaviours. Personal gains often outweigh the costs, because the costs are partly externalised.

A situation where most of the benefits are personalised but many of the costs are externalised can be described as a “tragedy of the commons” problem (Hardin, 1968; Ostrom, 1990). The commons are collectively owned resources that are used by individuals. A typical example is a common grazing area that all shepherds in a village use to graze their sheep. If it is overgrazed, all shepherds have to pay the price by losing the resource, but the individual benefit of adding just one more sheep to the herd goes to the individual shepherd. There is thus a strong incentive to add additional sheep. One more will not do much harm, but if all shepherds add one more, the price would be high. A typical outcome of such settings is a depletion of the resource. Several strategies can be applied to reduce the negative effects of a common-type situation: most effectively privatisation of the commons, punishment of resource-depleting behaviour, rewards for behaviour protecting the resource, enforcing communication between the actors, or giving feedback about the destructive mechanisms (Bell, Greene, Fisher, & Baum, 2001).

Both macroeconomics and microeconomics assume people are rational actors who select the alternative that gives them the best possible cost–benefit ratio. Research has found, however, numerous examples of deviations from rationality by decision-makers. Most widely known is the work by Kahneman and Tversky (Kahneman & Tversky, 1984; Tversky & Kahneman, 1981, 1986) that shows different presentations of the same choice problem resulted in very different behaviours although the problem in essence was the same. Different forms of presentation are referred to as framing (Tversky & Kahneman, 1986). People react differently if the same event is framed in terms of a loss or in terms of a gain. Tversky and Kahneman (1981) confronted people with two different versions of the same problem: (a) choose between either a sure gain of $240 or a 25% chance to win $1,000 and 75% to win nothing or (b) choose between either a sure loss of $750 or a 75% chance to lose $1,000 and 25% chance to lose nothing. While in situation (a) 84% of the participants preferred the sure gain, in situation (b) 87% of the participants preferred to take their chances to avoid the loss by gambling, though risking an even higher loss.

The example presented in the previous paragraph indicates that people do not behave as rationally as might be assumed, even when they make economic decisions. Furthermore, what is rational for an individual may not be rational from a societal perspective. That makes environmental communication also an important part of an economic perspective on environmental problems. It was shown that how you frame economic choices does matter.

1.2.3 Environmental sociology

Environmental sociology is the branch of sociology that is interested in environment–society interactions. An important part of environmental sociology deals with the question of how environmental problems are caused by social factors and social structures, how environmental problems impact societies, and how they can be solved from a societal perspective (Hannigan, 2006). Because of its focus on communication and discourse, environmental sociology is probably the most dominant theoretical perspective in the field of environmental communication. Environmental sociology focuses strongly on discourses about the environment, the construction of meaning through this discourse, and the reflection of power differences and societal structures in environmental destruction (or conservation). Furthermore, the emergence of technological shifts and their impact on society and the environment are analysed. Typically, environmental sociology describes the complex interdependencies between the human population, its organisational structure, technology, and the environment. In his Population-Organization-Environment-Technology (POET) model, Duncan (1961) builds on an ecosystem metaphor to describe these ...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures, Tables, and Boxes
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• References
• Index