Editorial: How Do Behavior Science Interventions to Reduce Environmental Impacts Work in The Real World?

Christian Andreas Klöckner^1*Jens Røyrvik²Giuseppe Carrus³Michael Niederkofler⁴

• ¹Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
• ²Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet, Trondheim, Norway
• ³Universita degli Studi Roma Tre, Rome, Italy
• ⁴Innovation Lab act4energy, Stegersbach, Austria

Environmental psychology and related behavior sciences have made substantial progress in theory development and in studying interventions to change people's pro-environmental behavior as many meta-analyses published in the last decades clearly show (e.g., Bamberg and Möser, 2007, Klöckner, 2013, Maki et al., 2019, Udall et al., 2021, Osbaldison and Schott, 2012). However, environmental psychologists have also been encouraged to take the potential impact of behaviors they aim to change more into account and put more effort into developing and testing interventions for such high impact behaviors (e.g., Nielsen et al., 2021, Gatersleben, 2023), while at the same time not ignoring the role of smaller or symbolic actions to signal changing social norms and build momentum to change. Furthermore, while environmental psychology thrives as a discipline, the strong dominance of studies residing in Western cultures is criticized more and more strongly in psychology in general, including environmental psychology (e.g., Gold et al., 2025, Masuda et al., 2020). Montesanti et al. (2021) is a good example for how taking in indigenous perspectives around coping with environmental stress enriches the theory building and practice of dealing with real world issues (wild fires in this case).Finally, several researchers have repeatedly called for a stronger focus of environmental psychology on the usability of its research for practical implementation (e.g., Ernst andWenzel, 2014, Clayton et al., 2016). We wholeheartedly support these calls for a behavior science that makes a real difference by focusing on behaviors with the potential to change impact substantially, extending beyond the WEIRD populations, and providing clear recommendations to practitioners. Combining the last two points, recommendations to practitioners beyond the western world is an area, that is largely absent in environmental psychology. In our view, this also requires a focus on papers studying the effects of psychological interventions in the real world. Taking this as a starting point, we launched our call for a research topic with exactly this focus in 2024, from which you see the outcomes published here. To be able to make a change in the real world, behavior science needs to study behaviors that have the potential to make a difference, when changed, because they have a high environmental impact and/or are implemented by many people, or they need to have the potential to stimulate larger changes through setting norms of change, even if their individual impact is small. Furthermore, behavior change interventions for such behaviors need to be tested under real-world conditions. Within this research topic, you will find empirical work that does both: study relevant behavior in the complexities of real-world contexts. Wilson and Whitmarsh ( 2025 The papers in our research topic cover countries as diverse as Norway, the USA, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Thailand, China, Spain, Sweden, Brazil, Switzerland, and an international database of car information and discussion platforms. While the majority of the presented papers still are based on data from Western, mostly European populations, we would like to highlight the papers by Hinn et al. ( 2025), Ma and Chen (2025) and Schimmelpfeng et al. ( 2024) as extending the global understanding of behavior research for the environment. Especially, the study by Ma and Chen (2025) seems relevant for this aspect, as it explores the role of social influence of pro-environmental behavior in the Chinese context. Schimmelpfeng et al. ( 2024) take a well-established psychological framework and test its applicability in a Brazilian context with school children and health behavior. However, we would also like to acknowledge, that more work outside the Global North needs to be conducted in environmental psychology, especially with challenging established theoretical frameworks and their applicability in new contexts. Three of our papers are literature reviews, addressing questions relevant for both researchers and practitioners: In her paper, Schorn (2024) presents an interesting summary of findings from 54 studies on social influence on pro-environmental behavior, especially with a focus on how minorities might change behavior of a majority group. This paper gives helpful guidelines for how to design interventions for environmental activists. Baker et al. ( 2024) also address pro-environmental behavior from a social perspective in their review on the relationship between joint proenvironmental behavior and mental well-being, where they identify potential especially for behaviors involving interaction with nature. This collection of interesting papers shows how vivid environmental psychological and other behavior science research can be, addressing pressing problems of our societies. Looking at the papers, it is clear that such research can help designing interventions that really make a difference, but the reviews also show that further research is needed, especially research that expands beyond Europe and North America, and even more specifically, research on interventions and theory building with a non-Western perspective. We also see, that a closer collaboration between behavioral researchers and practitioners might improve the usability of this research further.