Switching behavior
Spring 2008 Interaction
Post-doctoral scholar Carrie Armel organized a conference
on"Behavior,
Energy and Climate Change" that was hugely successful.
Photo: L.A. Cicero
If it is difficult to get kids to think they can do something about being overweight, imagine getting them to think they can do something about global warming. But it turns out both are possible, and some people think they are related.
The Precourt Institute for Energy Efficiency was established in 2006 with a gift from alumnus Jay Precourt. The institute is organized into six clusters of research: building, transportation, energy modeling, policy, systems and behavior.
Everyone from Precourt Institute Director James Sweeney down to the average well-meaning citizen knows that overcoming global warming is a complicated endeavor.
"There's no silver bullet," he told a group assembled in March to celebrate the fifth anniversary of Stanford's Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP)."There's not even silver buckshot."
In the 1970s, he pointed out, interest in energy alternatives vanished as soon as the price of oil went back down."So we can't have a limp response, and it's not going to be cheap or easy. Behavior change is important, but without fundamental technological change, nothing will happen."
But there are those who say behavior change is a critical piece, though the approaches are not mutually exclusive. It's quick, it's cheap and it's essential.
Among those proponents at Stanford is postdoctoral scholar K. Carrie Armel, who earned a PhD in psychology and cognitive science with an emphasis in neuroscience. She outlined her views this winter to the Energy Seminar, an initiative by the Woods Institute for the Environment that drew crowds week after week to listen to engineers and policy analysts. California State Assembly Bill 32 in 2006 established the goal of reducing greenhouse gases by 2020 down to 1990 levels, a reduction of nearly 30 percent compared to projected levels. There's not a lot of time, Armel said in her presentation, describing those behavior-related approaches that are less effective (public service announcements and standard advertising approaches) and more effective (opt-out renewable energy programs and card-swiping or readable meters that remind users how much energy they're using and how much they're paying).
"I've known since high school that I wanted to work on something related to both behavior and the environment," she said later."I've been talking about these issues of behavior so long. I used to get smirks and embarrassed looks. Around a year ago they stopped smiling. Al Gore's movie changed everything; it made that possible."
Her first mentor at Stanford was Antonio Rangel, a pioneer in the field of neuroeconomics. Soon after arriving, Armel submitted a funding proposal to the Woods Institute to design a climate-change reality television show, such as those that have been wildly successful in Latin America. But the proposal did not get funded.
Thomas Robinson, professor of pediatrics and a leader in the fight against child obesity through"stealth interventions," was one of the researchers on that proposal. He had independently contacted Woods to see if his interest in brain imaging and motivational activities might find some echoes there. Members of an ongoing committee of environmental and medical scholars referred him to Armel. By then, Rangel was getting ready to leave Stanford, so Armel and Robinson created a partnership combining their interests in energy, obesity and behavior.
Promoting Behavior Change, cross-listed in Human Biology and Earth Systems, is one of the results. The class develops activities aimed at motivating people to change their energy consumption. Last year, the Stanford students divided into four groups—food, waste, electricity and transportation, and their respective relationship to climate change. Each group designed an intervention for high-school students; for example, having them keep logs recording their energy use, setting up a buddy system to enforce behavior or organizing relay races around the use of line-drying clothes (some of the kids had no idea one could dry clothes on a line). This year the class will move to an elementary school. The hands-on work is accompanied by readings in psychology, marketing, communication, education, behavioral economics, design and other disciplines.
The teaching assistant for the course this year is Anna Lee, an Earth Systems co-term student. Last year, when she was a student in the class, she also worked on the Sustainable Choice Card, a project organized by Earth Systems students to help people make wiser eating choices.
Anna Lee, an Earth Systems co-term, is a teaching assistant in Armel's course; last year she helped create Stanford's Sustainable Choice Card, which helps people make better eating decisions.
"We wanted people to be aware that their decisions make a difference, and we gave a lot of thought to how to present that information," she said."That process was very similar to what we went through in class to choose our target energy behaviors." And, she added, she dries her own laundry on a clothesline now. She has even adapted the social psychology she picked up from Robinson and Armel to make herself practice the viola.
For Robinson, there is an obvious methodological similarity in getting kids involved in changing their own behavior around eating or around energy use. For one thing, at times they are one and the same thing. Walking instead of driving. Eating healthy food grown nearby versus eating processed food manufactured far away.
The Precourt Institute was one of the sponsors of a unique conference last fall in Sacramento on"Behavior, Energy and Climate Change."
"We got double the expected attendance," said Armel, one of the organizers. Some 500 people attended the meeting—so many, in fact, that the conference will become an annual affair. The next one, in November, will feature an extra day of sessions.
"The Department of Energy is interested in behavior now, and the state Public Utilities Commission is pursuing behavioral initiatives," Armel said."Once they figured out we need to make changes really fast, they got interested, because technology can take decades. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, among others, has suggested that some of the cheapest and most significant energy reductions are at the residential level."
Presentations at the conference covered a range of issues that all seemed to hover around one central issue: What do we know about human behavior and decision-making that can be applied to energy-use reduction? The work spanned policy, buildings and technology, media and marketing, and community-based initiatives. What people know, or think they know, may get in the way of certain cost-cutting, it turns out. They may believe clean energy is an impossibility; they may believe it's too late; they may believe they're the only ones interested, making their behavior useless. But, to use a political metaphor, every vote counts.
The Precourt Institute funds research proposals in its six clusters, and Armel said she hopes the round of proposals this spring will include some that emphasize behavior and energy. There may be one from the Graduate School of Business on environmental attitudes by different social groups, and perhaps one from a researcher at the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital evaluating media messages about climate change. Psychologist Sam McClure, who is talking with Robinson about possible collaboration regarding child obesity, is also interested in consumer attitudes toward energy-efficient technology. The rate at which people demand to recoup the purchase price of a new refrigerator in reduced power bills is extraordinary, he said."They are much more impatient in this domain than in most others."
