Are you ready to change?
15 June 2022
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The achievement of climate neutrality planned by the European Green Deal will entail a profound economic and social transformation, demanding a joint effort of the whole European society.
When it comes to promoting, encouraging or launching behavioural and cultural changes, neglecting the human factor could seriously undermine the entire process. That’s why every sustainable and long-lasting policy for addressing climate-related challenges requires considering people’s needs, perceptions, values, and attitudes or, in brief, their psychology.
Since 2008, the Virtual Human Dynamics Laboratory (VirtHuLab) at the University of Florence (Italy), has been working to find the best ways to bring people together and help them collaborate fruitfully, thus contributing to the creation of a better society. In our vision, this means building a society where citizens, and residents in general, are willing and motivated to address local environmental issues and, more broadly, tackle climate change together.
But how to achieve that?
As members of PHOENIX’s consortium, we believe that citizens’ willingness to change is deeply affected by their trust in public institutions which, in turn, depends on the institutions’ ability to intercept citizens’ needs and take into consideration their insights, opinions, and contributions. This is why it is crucial to find solutions to rebuild mutual trust between citizens and public authorities. To achieve this goal there is no standard solution good for every territory. When it comes to finding ways to bring citizens and policymakers together to address environmental issues, participation and empowerment need to be built according to the specificities and needs of each territory.
Among the psychological features that can describe a territory and thus the community which inhabits it, two of them deserve special attention: readiness to change and beliefs about climate change. It is clear that if many people within a community doubt the anthropogenic origin of climate change, this may weaken public participation, despite the efforts of local leaders and policymakers.
At the same time, if people do not perceive themselves as actually ready to change their behaviours and habits, the implementation of policies meant to address environmental issues will be undermined.
As VirtHuLab, we selected the best measures to capture these two psychological dimensions and, together with the other PHOENIX partners, we ignited a large-scale cross-national data collection in 7 countries (Portugal, Estonia, France, Spain, Iceland, Italy, and Hungary) in order to deploy, in the following phases of the project, experiences in line with people’s readiness to change, and support the weakest aspects that can contribute to a lack of readiness to change.
Readiness to change is indeed a complex psychological phenomenon that includes different components. For instance, a minimum level of concern about climate change is required if people are to consider changing their behaviours. Feeling motivated to change is another factor that increases people’s readiness to change. People’s promptness to change depends also on the perception that the adoption of more sustainable behaviours could really make a difference. Finally, people are keener to change if others are doing the same, thus perceived social support may promote the adoption and maintenance of pro-environmental behaviours.
Having a detailed psychological map of these characteristics is crucial to deliver customised and suited experiences aimed at enhancing people’s readiness to change in each pilot site.
Hopefully, PHOENIX will soon prove the effectiveness of this approach.
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