Environmental Behavioral Sciences Seminar with Antonia Krefeld-Schwalb

We Care About What You Care About: Using Reason-Specific Interventions to Encourage Sustainable Choices

Behavioral change is essential for climate change mitigation and adaptation. However, interventions encouraging sustainable choices often do not have the desired effect. To address this, we examined consumers' mental representations of environmentally consequential behaviors across seven situations to understand the reasons underlying sustainable and unsustainable choices. Using large language model-based topic modeling, we identified relevant reasons from open-ended responses underlying consumers' choices across seven situations. These reasons can be divided into situation-specific reasons, such as taste, which are mainly associated with a single situation, and general reasons, such as costs, which are applicable across situations.  We applied these insights in two field experiments, in which participants received messages encouraging less meat and dairy consumption or reducing their shower duration. We randomly varied the message content, using situation-specific or general reasons. Only situation-specific messages significantly reduced meat and dairy consumption, while only general messages reduced shower duration during the 7-day study. We conclude that different situations are governed by different reasons and that interventions are most effective when they appeal to the reasons most central to the targeted behavior in that situation. Our results offer promising opportunities for developing more effective interventions by examining mental representations of the target behavior. 

Bio

Antonia Krefeld-Schwalb, is associate professor of Marketing at RSM. She studies and teaches the impact of individual differences on responses to marketing and policy measures to improve targeting and segmentation. Her substantive focus is on sustainable consumer behaviour and adaptation to climate risk, and how to make persuasive messages such as emails and text messages as well as incentives more effective.