Combating climate change will require sweeping cultural transitions towards sustainable lifestyles and societies. However, clear pathways to achieve global behavior change are severely lacking, making human behavior one of the largest sources of uncertainty in models of emissions reduction pathways. My PhD research is focused on understanding attitude and behavior change across populations. This interdisciplinary work combines insights from psychology, policy, and economics with modeling methods from mathematics and cultural evolution. I develop models and simulations of culture change over time to see what pathways are available to secure rapid, lasting transitions to more sustainable societies.
In my models, I am able to investigate the interactions between forces of top-down “systems change,” such as policies and innovations, and bottom-up “individual change,” such as social movements and psychological interventions. I find that neither of these forces alone is sufficient to generate the transformations needed, and I discover ways to integrate these forces via well-timed interventions to maximize the rate and stability of behavior change. For instance, I find that, by leveraging pro-environmental attitudes, it is possible to foster widespread uptake of sustainable behaviors, even when they are still slightly more costly and effortful than unsustainable alternatives (e.g. biking to work instead of driving, eating plant-based instead of meat). The insights from my models allow me to craft recommendations to researchers and practitioners in order to better coordinate efforts towards generating positive behavior change.
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