About this Research Topic
Behavior sciences like environmental psychology, behavioral economy, behavioral geography, social anthropology, and sociology have created a deep understanding of how pro-environmental actions are embedded in and caused by individual, social, economic, and physical structures. Based on these insights, many intervention strategies have been developed and tested, some of them with impressive success under controlled conditions. However, what is needed now to address the pressing challenges our societies face are recipes for how to scale these – often small-scale or lab-based – “proofs of concept” up into the real world to populations consisting of millions of people and make them ready to be implemented by non-scientists. Therefore, it is important to know, which conditions and practical considerations determine if an intervention that has proven successful in the laboratory also can unfold its impact when applied large-scale to be able to unlock the full potential of intervention campaigns informed by behavior science.
The goal of this research focus is, thus, to collect studies and papers that address the issue of real-world interventions, that explore the possible pitfalls, when leaving the realm of well-funded pilots, carefully guided by scientists, and that develop an understanding of how behavior science can be translated into easily usable, but powerful instruments to empower citizens to change their practices, for example, reduce their energy consumption. We aim to build a collection of highly influential papers that determine the conditions under which upscaling works or does not work, for which target groups which intervention is viable, which channels can be used to communicate the interventions, and how to engage partners such as public administrations, municipalities, non-governmental organizations or companies (e.g., energy or mobility providers) in campaigns that have the potential to really change the world.
We envision papers to deal with for example but not exclusively the following topics:
- Which interventions work for which target groups?
- What are the cultural differences in intervention strategies?
- Does it matter, who is communicating the interventions and through which channel?
- What are the experiences, learnings, and benefits of collaboration between behavior science and stakeholders in the real world?
- Which parts of the population are excluded or exclude themselves from intervention campaigns?
- How to reach the hard-to-reach people?
- How to affect the hard-to-affect people
- Which tools could make behavior science informed interventions more usable by non-scientific actors?
- How to talk about behavior science in a useful and comprehensible way?
- How to make behavior scientists understand the necessities of the real world?
The goal of this research focus is, thus, to collect studies and papers that address the issue of real-world interventions, that explore the possible pitfalls, when leaving the realm of well-funded pilots, carefully guided by scientists, and that develop an understanding of how behavior science can be translated into easily usable, but powerful instruments to empower citizens to change their practices, for example, reduce their energy consumption. We aim to build a collection of highly influential papers that determine the conditions under which upscaling works or does not work, for which target groups which intervention is viable, which channels can be used to communicate the interventions, and how to engage partners such as public administrations, municipalities, non-governmental organizations or companies (e.g., energy or mobility providers) in campaigns that have the potential to really change the world.
We envision papers to deal with for example but not exclusively the following topics:
- Which interventions work for which target groups?
- What are the cultural differences in intervention strategies?
- Does it matter, who is communicating the interventions and through which channel?
- What are the experiences, learnings, and benefits of collaboration between behavior science and stakeholders in the real world?
- Which parts of the population are excluded or exclude themselves from intervention campaigns?
- How to reach the hard-to-reach people?
- How to affect the hard-to-affect people
- Which tools could make behavior science informed interventions more usable by non-scientific actors?
- How to talk about behavior science in a useful and comprehensible way?
- How to make behavior scientists understand the necessities of the real world?
Keywords: Energy consumption reduction, Environmental footprint, Behaviour science interventions, Upscaling, Barriers in the real world, Collaboration with user partners
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