People Want to Know Sustainable Policies Can Work. So Show Them.

But while many people in the U.S. believe addressing climate change is important, doing something about it can be challenging, as structural and other societal factors can get in the way.

“When it comes to sustainability, it’s hard to get people to behave differently,” says Matejas Mackin, a Kellogg doctoral student in marketing. “For example, it’s great to bike or walk to work instead of driving, but unless you live in one of a few U.S. cities, that may not be possible because public transportation infrastructure is insufficient.”

Trevor Spelman, a Kellogg doctoral student in management and organizations, adds that “there’s a strong aversion to changing the status quo.” Inertia can be a powerful factor that prevents people, even motivated ones, from acting.

So the students teamed up with Adam Waytz, a Kellogg professor of management and organizations, to see whether they could design an intervention that would make people more amenable to taking action. Specifically, the researchers developed ways to educate people about the positive impact that sustainability policies were currently having in other countries. Then they tested the impact of this information in a series of experiments with U.S.-based participants.

“We hypothesized that if we could get people to think outside of their current here and now, they would be more amenable to different policies to promote sustainability,” Waytz says.

Across four studies, the researchers found that informing U.S. residents about the successful implementation of sustainability policies abroad, such as policies leading to new wind energy infrastructure and reduced automobile use, increased support for similar legislation at home. It also increased people’s intentions to change their behavior to align with the policies.

“We see this intervention as a potential tool that could collectively motivate citizens to take action to change their own personal behaviors, and importantly, to support these policies that challenge the status quo,” Spelman says.

Sustainability lessons from abroad

The researchers devised multiple experiments to assess how learning about sustainability policies and efforts outside the U.S. would impact how participants felt about domestic efforts. The studies collectively included over 2,500 participants, all based in the U.S.

In one experiment, for example, a group of participants was shown a short article on sustainable urban-planning policies in Paris. These policies prioritized biking and walking over driving cars. A control group read an article on U.S.-based planning emphasizing driving. Multiple measures revealed that those who’d read about the Parisian sustainability policies subsequently expressed more support for similar policies and planning here in the U.S., such as repurposing on-street automobile parking for bike lanes. That group was also more likely to express intent to engage in sustainable behavior such as reducing reliance on cars.

“Lack of imagination is often a barrier to adopting novel behaviors,” Waytz says.

“And so seeing transformative policies implemented abroad,” Mackin adds, “makes people feel like, ‘Maybe I can support these kinds of policies at home.’”

This is true even for policies that could directly impact participants, the researchers found. When the team ran a similar study on Chicago residents specifically, they found that learning about the success of urban-planning policies in Paris increased their support for policies that would improve public transportation and reduce automobile traffic on Lake Shore Drive, a major area thoroughfare.

“It’s an opportunity to see if people put their money where their mouth is by supporting a policy that might change their real-life status quo,” Spelman says.

A broad-ranging positive effect

This finding is not specific to urban planning. The researchers found similar results using an article about wind-energy infrastructure in Denmark.

The existing sustainability policies that participants learn about, moreover, needn’t be those from European or other Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic (what researchers call “WEIRD”) nations. Another follow-up study used both Colombia and France as reference countries, finding similar positive effects on U.S. participants for both. “So, it’s simply learning about a sustainable policy and its effectiveness in another country that leads to increased support domestically,” Spelman says.

Of note, the effect was evident for both self-identified Republicans and Democrats. “You might think conservatives may be less receptive to this kind of intervention because it means implicitly that America’s not ‘number one’ in this context or there’s less interest in sustainability,” Mackin says. “That’s not what we found.”

A route to change

The research suggests that even simple ways of communicating the success of sustainability policies abroad—such as via social media or brief blog posts—could have a big impact on how people view sustainability at home.

“There’s a growing trend on Twitter right now for this kind of messaging,” Spelman says. “It’s a tool that’s effectively applicable for both grassroots organizers and institutional policymakers to engage the population.”

The researchers started their effort looking at how to motivate U.S.-based participants, in part because of America’s outsized contribution to climate change and dependence on vehicles. But they don’t intend to stop there.

“We also want to explore how this applies across nations and different populations who receive this messaging. Everything we did was U.S.-centric,” Spelman says. “If we can teach people in the Netherlands about a process in Nepal that improves the city bus system, it would increase the scope of this all-hands-on-deck approach to climate change through this intervention.”