Influencing behaviours: ISM technical guide

• Discounting
  Manipulating the perceived costs and benefits of a behaviour is a key way to influence behavioural decisions. In traditional economics, future benefits are discounted against the present at a constant rate - that is to say, what we are prepared to pay for them declines over time, at an even rate. By contrast, behavioural economics takes account of the fact that people are 'impatient': they apply much higher discount rates over the short term than in the long term. This is known as 'hyperbolic discounting', and explains how jam today has a premium over jam tomorrow, which has a (smaller) premium over jam later still.
  
  The principles of discounting particularly relate to financial decisions, where it is observed that people would rather spend money now than tie it up in long-term investments. However, applying a wider definition of costs and benefits, which includes non-financial costs, such as time and effort (also known as
  'transaction costs') can broaden the applicability of discounting to include other non-financial behavioural decisions. In this way, any behaviour in which the benefits appear in the distant future but where the obvious 'costs' are all upfront, e.g. dieting, or not flying, can be seen to be difficult to 'sell' to the public. Hence discounting techniques may be helpful, such as looking for immediate or short-term benefits to promote the desired behaviour, such as meeting new friends and looking good if selling the benefits of taking up a new sport to the public.
  
  Examples of discounting in the context of low carbon behaviours could include: people being reluctant to invest in a new boiler because of the upfront costs, despite the future flow of annual savings; people being unwilling to go without airconditioning in warm weather.
• Framing
  Framing explores the way in which options are arranged, and how that influences the choices that people make. Traditional economics assumes that people make rational choices based on an accurate assessment of the costs and benefits of each option involved. Instead, behavioural economics shows how the way options are set out or 'framed' will influence the choices people make, and thus how they behave. For instance, how options are arranged on a form influences which one people will choose, just as how the way items are laid out in a supermarket influences what people will buy.
  
  Framing principles have wide relevance to social behaviours, including those with a norms dimension. Messages which demonstrate that a course of action is the same as that undertaken by most people in an individual's peer group can be very persuasive in shaping the behavioural choices people make. For example, in Nudge Thaler & Sunstein (2008) feature the well-known example of the reduction in the amount of laundry done by hotels, by placing notices in rooms about most guests reusing towels.
  
  Examples of framing in the context of low carbon behaviours could include: promoting walking to work as a way of getting fit (rather than tackling climate change); people being persuaded to eat less meat by hearing about how friends or celebrities have also changed their diets; people taking part in neighbourhood clean-ups so they don't miss out on the social benefits of participating.
• Loss Aversion
  The concept of loss aversion refers to the phenomenon whereby individuals strongly prefer to avoid losses than acquire gains of the same amount. For example, it is likely that part of the success of bottle deposit schemes lies in consumers' loss aversion. When people hand over their deposit on the bottle as part of the purchase price, loss aversion suggests that the failure to return the bottle and get the deposit back will trigger a larger psychological cost than the monetary value of the incentive would suggest.
  
  In an overlap with the concept of framing, one consequence of loss aversion is that people will tend to value something more highly when they own it than when they do not, because giving up an object is a loss that weighs more heavily than the gains associated with acquiring it. Therefore, disincentives such
  as penalties and fines may be more effective when framed as losses, i.e. threatening to take something away from people that they already have, such as their TV if they don't pay their TV licence, may be more effective rather than simply imposing a monetary fine.
  
  Examples of loss aversion in the context of low carbon behaviours could include: people responding better to messages emphasising that installing a new boiler will stop you wasting £100 a year, than messages emphasising it will save you £100 per year; the disadvantages of installing insulation (such as the 'lost' time of fitting) being weighed more heavily than its advantages (such as warmth and energy saving).
• Mental Accounting
  Behavioural economics shows that people have distinct mental accounts or 'pots' in which they make cost/benefit calculations for different areas of their lives. By framing choices in the context of different mental pots, people can be encouraged to calculate the relative costs and benefits differently. For instance, if travelling by train was framed as a leisure experience rather than a high-speed means of getting from one place to another, then it might appeal more than flying to those travelling for non-work reasons. Another example includes winter fuel payments - people are more likely to spend money on their energy bills when the benefit is called a winter fuel allowance, rather than when given as a general payment.
  
  An example of mental accounting in the context of low carbon behaviours could include: staff taking energy saving more seriously if energy costs were deducted from a notional 'bonus pot' for each team to share at the end of the year.

• Perceived Behavioural Control: PBC is defined as a perception of the "ease or difficulty" of performing a behaviour (Ajzen, 1991).
• Self Efficacy: Self efficacy is defined as "the conviction that one can successfully execute the behaviour required to produce the outcomes" (Bandura, 1977).

• Injunctive norms: also called 'ought' norms - what we perceive others would approve of our doing in society (laws may help make this explicit).
• Descriptive norms: also called 'is' norms - what we perceive to be approved behaviour in society based on the behaviour we see others performing around us (this can deviate from injunctive norms, e.g. in the context of laws on speeding on the motorway).

Hard infrastructure relates to the firm boundaries to people's behavioural choices presented by the environments in which they live (for example, without a bus service, there will be no chance of bus use). Such factors can often prevent even motivated people from undertaking the behaviour in question. Alongside hard infrastructure, soft infrastructure emphasises features of everyday life which also bound individual action, but are not concrete (see Time & Schedules, and Rules & Regulations ).

Infrastructure appears in all the main disciplinary approaches to behaviour change, not least in recognition of the fact that human behaviour cannot be reduced simply to individual choices.

In social psychology, Triandis's Theory of Interpersonal Behaviour ( TIB) includes a factor called Facilitating Conditions. This refers to external influences, "out there in the environment" (Triandis, 1980). This factor points to the material barriers which prevent even motivated people from undertaking a behaviour. In this view, more or less CO ₂emitting behaviours are constrained or enabled by access (or lack of it) to the relevant infrastructures. For example, efforts to encourage people to move away from private car use partly rely on the availability of adequate and affordable public transport and/or the provision of safe walking/cycling routes.

Similarly, existing infrastructures underpin many of the behaviours that people undertake in their everyday lives. For example, ecological models in social psychology focus on influences in the environments in which people live. Hence health psychologists talk about 'obesogenic environments', defined as ones in which the opportunities to exercise are relatively scarce, while there is a superabundance of affordable and convenient energy-dense food. It follows that availability, accessibility and affordability (here, of healthy foods) are key points of intervention.

In behavioural economics, the infrastructure is often the same as the decision context; the place in which behavioural choices are made. By rearranging the infrastructure (or 'choice architecture' in the terminology of Nudge), the decision making process can be rearranged, or the options 'reframed'. In a simple example, if the lift is situated at the back of a building, while the stairs are in the front lobby, more people will use the stairs.

Finally, in practice theory, infrastructure appears as one of the elements in the 'Materials' type, along with other elements of hard infrastructure such as objects and technologies. For example, the practice of cycling to work requires bicycles (as objects or technologies) and roads or cycle lanes (as infrastructures) - as well as human riders, the time and skills to cycle, and the meanings of health or active travel which all come together to sustain the practice of cycling.

Examples of infrastructure in the context of encouraging low carbon behaviours could include: cycle lanes; anaerobic digestion plants (and food waste collections); electric vehicle charging points; allotments and community gardens.

Selected references include:
Swinburn et al, 1999
Thaler & Sunstein, 2008
Triandis, 1980

Technology is sometimes contrasted to behaviour, in that techno-fixes are presented as ruling out the need for individuals to change their behaviour. However, individuals and technologies interact, and this can influence the effectiveness of a technology in terms of its desired impact ( e.g. smart meters and how they are used in practice). This interaction also enables new practices, and the meanings of these practices, to spring up and take hold quickly ( e.g. tweeting).

Technologies are understood by some people to lie outside of the behaviour change remit, with technological fixes seen as an alternative to changes in individuals' behaviour. However, it is important to emphasise that technological improvements are - and always have been - central to efforts that aim to reduce the environmental impacts of the things people do. To understand this, it is vital to recognise the various ways in which people interact with technologies.

Firstly, sociologists have long understood that technology has the potential to 'script' human behaviour ( i.e. to trigger sequences of behaviour appropriate to a particular setting). Classic examples are traffic calming measures such as sleeping policemen which force drivers to slow down, or washing machines, which when first introduced required people to learn new ways of handling laundry, applying cleaning products, and drying clothes.

Secondly, technologies have the potential to reduce the environmental impacts of the things that people do without requiring them to stop doing them. Examples include electric vehicles or videoconferencing instead of travelling to meetings. However, the challenge is persuading people to adopt these more environmentally friendly technologies in the first place. Allied to this, it is important to ensure that once people adopt them; they go on to use them appropriately. For example, the environmental benefits of concentrated laundry products (including reduced packaging and reduced emissions from distribution) will not be realized if people continue to wash their clothes using the same quantities as they did before. It is therefore essential that technological interventions take place alongside interventions in the individual and social contexts of behaviour.

Thirdly, people may well reject or misuse particular technologies. For example, energy-monitoring devices such as smart meters have the potential to create conflict in the home or workplace, as arguments might erupt over how much energy different people are using, thus discouraging people from using them and thus saving energy. Therefore such interventions should include measures to address factors in the social and individual contexts.

Examples of technologies in the context of encouraging low carbon behaviours include: videoconferencing, microgeneration, smart meters, electric vehicles.

Selected references include:
Akrich, 1992
Bijker, 1997
Latour, 1991
Shove, 2003

Many behaviours ( e.g. cycling to work) involve the use of objects ( e.g. a bike, cycle racks at work), and the lack of necessary objects can stop a practice from being undertaken. As with technologies, objects and individual users interact such that sometimes the object can 'act back' on its owners and heavily influence how much time an individual spends on which practices.

Objects play an important role in shaping the things that people do and the ways in which they change their behaviour. For example, line drying clothes outside, rather than using a tumble dryer, requires a clothes line and pegs (and no rain!), just as cycling requires a bicycle. Objects are very often 'taken for granted' and all but invisible in thinking about influencing behaviours. For instance, how comfortable or cool a bicycle is will influence who would be prepared to ride it.

However practice theory draws our attention to how the object also shapes the practice, and as a 'non-human actor' often 'acts back' on the individual. For instance, gardens can end up structuring the time of people who use them ( e.g. they need to be at home during certain months to plant and manage a vegetable garden), while waste imposes a set of time-consuming practices on the conscientious householder ( e.g. cleaning and sorting recyclates for collection). All these objects also require an associated set of competencies (skills) in order for them to be used in particular practices ( e.g. knowing which recyclates go in which bins in order to be able to recycle properly).

In keeping with psychology's emphasis on perceptions and attitudes more than things themselves, the relationship with objects in psychology is simpler. As with infrastructure, the presence of the relevant object can be seen as a driver of the behaviour (or a 'Facilitating Condition').

Examples of objects in the context of low carbon behaviours include: bicycles and showers (for cycling to work); kerbside recycling bins.

Selected references include:
Jalas, 2005
Shove et al, 2007

At their most basic, rules and regulations are set out by formal institutions, such as government, to prescribe or prohibit certain kinds of behaviour ( e.g. through the taxation system). Yet rules and regulations are also implicit, for instance determining appropriate conduct for individuals in informal institutions.

Just as institutions can be formal or informal, so too can rules and regulations. For example, there is no formal rule that obliges individuals to take off their shoes when entering somebody else's home or give up their seat on public transport for an elderly or heavily pregnant passenger. However people are often expected to behave in this way, and failure to do so leaves them open to scrutiny and judgement.

Accordingly, in general, sociology adopts a wider approach, associating rules with shared understandings of what is normal and appropriate conduct. These informal rules and regulations are often 'hidden' and only revealed during the doing of particular activities - either correctly or incorrectly. As such, they are not dissimilar to social norms and so interventions here could take a similar form by making explicit the hidden conventions which people follow.

Meanwhile, in theories of practice, rules are formally understood as types of framework, including policies, regulatory and fiscal arrangements, and relevant schemes and initiatives run by particular institutions (these can overlap with costs and benefits in economics, in the form of incentives and disincentives, financial or otherwise). Accordingly, low carbon behaviours might be fostered through legislative measures that formalise shifts in rules and regulatory frameworks to enable different ways of doing things to be tried out. If successful, they might also help to 'normalise' low carbon behaviours and shift shared understandings of normal and appropriate conduct ( e.g. as per the smoking ban in the area of public health).

Examples of formal rules and regulations in the context of encouraging low carbon behaviours could include: tax breaks, feed-in tariffs and other grant schemes; cycle to work schemes.

Selected references include:
Durkheim, 1883
Foucault, 1975
Parsons, 1937

Time is a finite resource that gets used in the course of carrying out everyday activities. Like money, it is a scarce resource that people have to allocate across competing demands.

How people allocate the scarce resource of time can be viewed as a result of the ways in which they are required or able to co-ordinate with other people and activities. Changes in the demands on people's time or the scheduling arrangements that are in place have the potential to affect the ways in which practices are carried out and, in turn, influence the CO ₂ intensity of different behaviours. For example, flexible working hours ( FWH) can affect peak load demand on transport systems and reduce the carbon emissions generated by stop-start commuting in rush hour traffic.

Practices are also understood to compete with each other for time and space ( e.g. line drying clothes and shift work). Other kinds of practices then come about to fill the gaps between other practices ( e.g. tumble drying clothes). Because of these inter-relationships, changes in schedules ( e.g. set by formal institutions) can often result in changes in people's practices - for instance, school hours and commuting habits.

Examples of schedules in the context of low carbon behaviours could include: reduced working hours; shop opening hours; timing of the school day; holiday allocations.

Selected references include:
Pred, 1981
Schor, 2005
Southerton, 2006
Zerubavel, 1985