Professor Ian Walker:

I am a professor of environmental psychology and head of the School of Psychology at Swansea University in Wales. I specialise in traffic safety, human aspects of the construction industry, energy consumption and water consumption. I also specialise in sustainable behaviours, particularly transport choices. I have tended to focus on behavioural influences that are unconscious or low-awareness, such as habits, and the way our social and infrastructural surroundings shape our actions. I have worked on UK Government projects like the Department for Transport’s climate change segmentation research. I am also an adviser on projects like the Department for Transport’s future transport zones trial and the west of England combined authority’s active travel social prescribing project. Along with industry and local government partners, I was part of a consortium that won a national UK award for work on energy practices in low-income households. I have also worked on relevant projects at the European level, most recently the €5m Horizon 2020 FORESEE project on resilient transport infrastructure.

The role of media and communications in influencing climate change action will depend to a large extent on what specific behaviour is being considered. For example, although encouraging people to drive less and to fix a leaking toilet both have climate implications, the two behaviours involve quite different psychological and social processes. I look forward to discussing specific examples with the committee. However, in advance of our discussion I have summarised two particular themes that cut across my work and which I hope might be useful as background information.

First, routines and habits are an important part of everyday behaviour and this is not always appreciated by those who try to influence behaviour through communications. A habit is an action that is triggered automatically when we are in a specific environment. If we carry out the same behaviour in the same setting many times, after a while we stop thinking about it and effectively delegate the decision to the environment. For example, I suspect that upon entering your bathroom this morning, you more or less unconsciously repeated the same sequence of actions that you perform every morning in that same bathroom. If you travelled to work today, I doubt you weighed up the pros and cons of each travel mode available to you and checked the timetables for every public transport option. It is more likely that you automatically made the familiar journey the same way as every other day without a great deal of thought. This tendency for everyday behaviours to become habitual has important implications for behaviour change communications. Presenting people with new information when they are in a habitual state is very unlikely to change their behaviour, since that behaviour is not the product of a deliberate, rational thought process that takes into account what they know. Once we are in a habitual state, we are not only less likely to seek out new information about the behaviour in question, but when new information is presented to us it tends to act like water off a duck’s back. Is there anything I could tell you today that would truly be likely to change your actions in the bathroom tomorrow morning?

More positively, because habitual behaviours are triggered by specific familiar environments, disruptions to those environments provide us with an opportunity. There is a body of research showing that disruptive lifestyle events, which change the context within which we act, can break habits and open short windows of time in which we are more likely to act on new information. For example, if you move home, it is simply impossible to autopilot to work and you are forced to think anew about how you will make the journey. At this point you are more likely to act on new information. A notable opportunity for communications, which to date seems to have been largely overlooked, is that for almost every major disruptive life event that people experience, such as moving home, starting a new job, having a child, buying a car or retiring, we literally inform the government when it is happening to us, often in advance. This means government might have an opportunity to target behaviour change communications with far more precision than today.

The second broad theme that cuts across my work concerns the separate roles of motivation and knowledge in shaping sustainable behaviour. In many situations where we want people to act differently, we simultaneously need to tell people what they should do and why they should do it. A common communication mistake is to address these two things in isolation. This is a point that has also been noted in public health and traffic safety communications. As I write this statement my home energy meter is telling me that my electricity consumption is costing me a lot of money. This is motivating me a great deal, but the meter’s display is doing literally nothing to tell me how I can act to solve the problem, only that the problem exists. It is like somebody shouting “there’s an emergency,” and then simply running away. I suggest that many climate communications either do something similar or they do the inverse. They tell people what they should do differently without properly explaining why it is important. Research I have done with my colleagues has shown that messages combining what people should do and why they should do it can be much more effective than either message in isolation, especially when those elements are framed in a way that is meaningful to the recipient.

In a trial of this approach, we cut household heating energy by 22% without any loss of comfort and increased people's energy literacy in the process.

These two themes do not cover all of the areas in which I work but they are relevant in the context of the brief outline of the committee's remit that I was given. I look forward to the opportunity to explore these topics further with members.