An installment of the Student Perspectives blog series
At the top of his commencement speech delivered to the graduating class of Kenyon College in 2005, writer David Foster Wallace proposed a parable: Two young fish are swimming along when they happen by
An installment of the Student Perspectives blog series
At the top of his commencement speech delivered to the graduating class of Kenyon College in 2005, writer David Foster Wallace proposed a parable: Two young fish are swimming along when they happen by an older fish, who says to them, “Morning boys, how’s the water?” The two fish continue swimming, and eventually one of them asks, “What the hell is water?” The point of the allegory, in Wallace’s words, is that “the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.” Our world is dying. The Amazon is on fire, glaciers are melting and releasing record levels of methane into the atmosphere, and our oceans are turning into vats of acid. Yet our culture, entrenched in consumerism, remains willfully ignorant of the water around us.
Climate change is a nebulous, temporal issue: the results of our actions won’t come to fruition for generations to come. How can we lead billions of us monkey-brained humans, who are hard-wired to enjoy the fruits of instant gratification, into a global shift of behavior? One possible answer is not to have the wise older fish educate us on what water is, but rather to leverage our monkey brains psychologically via marketing strategies into sustainable behaviors.
Researchers Katherine White, Rishad Habib, and David J. Hardisty have worked to compile and synthesize the behavioral science literature that relates to facilitating consumer’s behavior in engaging in sustainable behaviors. They published their work in the Journal of Marketing in 2019 under the title “How to SHIFT Consumer Behaviors to be More Sustainable: A Literature Review and Guiding Framework.” They categorized their findings under “five broad psychological routes to encouraging sustainable consumer behavior change”: Social influence, Habit formation, Feelings and cognition, and Tangibility (SHIFT). The researchers suggest that consumers are more likely to engage in pro-environmental behavior when psychologically leveraged by these factors.
Employing the SHIFT framework may not only encourage consumers to engage in pro-environmental behavior; “businesses able to adapt to the demands of our changing world, including the urgent demand for sustainability, will be more likely to thrive in the long term.” In other words, the researchers argue adopting the SHIFT framework and encouraging sustainable behavior is strategic environmentally and economically. Here’s how.
Our behavior is unconsciously dominated by social factors; White, Habib, and Hardesty suggest that “social factors are one of the most influential factors in terms of affecting sustainable consumer behavior change.” For example, men may not engage in environmentally conscious behavior because they associate those actions with feminine traits. On the flip side, if a community leader engages in environmentally conscious behavior, such as installing solar panels on their roof, their community is more likely to follow suit. Additionally, the authors state: “Consumers are more likely to act in a socially desirable manner in public contexts in which people can observe and evaluate their actions.” By utilizing these psychological factors, marketers can leverage consumer behavior to be more environmentally conscious. Tag lines such as “Your neighbors are installing solar panels; are you?” or “Real men recycle” are effective tools to socially leverage consumer behavior to be more sustainable.
Some sustainable behaviors are described as “one-time actions,” such as installing solar panels. However, many other sustainable behaviors require repeated actions, such as taking efficient showers. This idea represents the “habit formation” factor in the SHIFT framework and is one of the most difficult factors to leverage into pro-environmental behavior. This is because many facets of climate change are exacerbated by habits that are deeply entrenched in our culture: driving, resource use, energy use, disposal of products, and more.
The researchers propose several different routes to leverage habit formation into pro-environmental behavior. “Discontinuity to change bad habits” refers to the introduction of roadblocks that make it difficult to engage in environmentally detrimental habits. They introduce the habit discontinuity hypothesis, which suggests that “if the context in which habits arise changes in some way, it becomes difficult to carry out the usual habits that would occur.” This could mean an introduction of tariffs, taxes, or fines on products and activities that are unsustainable. However, this type of negative reinforcement can backfire and trigger a self-defense response in which consumers push back on the roadblocks in their way. Therefore, it is often more effective to introduce positive reinforcement to leverage habit formation into sustainable behavior.
Incentives can increase desired behaviors and positive habit formation. This could mean monetary incentives such as rebates, tiered pricing, rewards, discounts, or gifts. Or, it could mean something as simple as a prompt: a message that appears before the consumer engages in a spec