4415 / Windkraftwerke: DEUTSCHLAND, Wind farm, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany.
By Ee Hwee Lau, PhD student at London Business School; Aneeta Rattan, Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School; Rainer Romero-Canyas, Lead Senior Behavioural Social Scientist at Environmental Defense Fund; and Krishna Savani, Professor of Management at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Climate change has been brought into sharp focus in recent years with intense weather events leading to food shortages, famine and the destruction of homes, businesses and infrastructure. Public awareness has been growing due to increased media coverage of events like the United Nations climate change conferences, high-profile climate activism and the efforts of governments and organisations to reduce or offset emissions.
Since the noughties, the term ‘carbon offset’ has entered popular parlance, linked to increased concern about CO2 as an atmospheric pollutant. Efforts to reduce industrial greenhouse gas emissions, improve energy efficiencies and increase renewable energy projects have proliferated. Similarly, carbon sequestration in soils and forests has been encouraged as a way to address the issue through tree planting and other initiatives.
The general public has been invited to play its part too, be it through recycling, insulating their homes, switching to green energy suppliers or paying an additional sum when flying to offset their miles. With the latter relatively easy and inexpensive to do, one might consider that getting people to join the cause by offsetting their private travel plans would be a no-brainer. This is not the case, however, so we teamed up with Rainer Romero-Canyas, a lead senior behavioural social scientist from the Environmental Defense Fund and Krishna Savani, Professor of Management from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University to understand the best way to motivate people to offset their flights.
The research group theorized that culturally-relevant frames – language that invokes valued cultural concepts without changing the communicated information – can increase people’s willingness to engage in environmental action. To test our theory, we set our investigation in the context of airlines offering carbon offset purchases to consumers during a flight purchase. Aviation is one of the leading producers of carbon emissions, and thus consumers’ decisions to offset emissions will be particularly important to address the rapidly escalating climate crisis and direct industry attention to consumers’ environmental concerns.
Getting people to do something when it comes at a financial cost to themselves is not always easy. There is, however, a wealth of anthropological and comparative social sciences knowledge about the links between cultural values and motivation. Consequently, this research focused on how cultural benefits might boost uptake of flight offsets.
We ran a series of experiments in the US and India to understand if the same information presented in culturally specific contexts would motivate people from the targeted cultures to act. People were randomly assigned to different messaging frames in a hypothetical flight-buying scenario and the effectiveness of the frames in promoting the purchase of the offsets was tested.
Two frames were consistently more effective than the control frame, with one working better in India and the other working better in the US. The ‘control frame’, which was identical to the messaging that the airline was using stated: ‘Help clear the air! This airline is committed to offsetting the pollution caused by air travel. This airline believes everyone can reduce their carbon footprint and promote a healthy and sustainable future.’
The frame that worked best in India focused on economic growth: ‘Promote India’s economic development: Help clear the air! This airline is committed to promoting India’s economic development by offsetting the pollution caused by air travel. This airline believes everyone can contribute to India’s successful growth and development by reducing their carbon footprint and promoting a healthy and sustainable future.’
The frame that worked best in the US put the emphasis on choice: ‘It’s your choice: Help clear the air! This airline chooses to offset the pollution caused by air travel. This airline believes everyone can choose to reduce their carbon footprint and promote a healthy and sustainable future.’
People in some cultures feel documented collective pride about national changes and progress, and yet these changes tend to come with greater concern for environmental degradation; hence we examined the frame that focused on economic growth in India. Across studies, this economic growth frame led to a 3.9% increase in Indians’ likelihood to purchase a carbon offset compared to the control frame.
Choice, on the other hand, is a powerful motivator for Americans. This choice frame led to a 4.5% increase in Americans’ likelihood to purchase a carbon offset relative to the control frame.
With COP27 in full swing and the countdown to COP28 already underway, this research (first published in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology) shows that understanding different cultures and contexts is vitally important when persuading people to support environmental action. What is more, there can be economic benefit in targeting cultural preferences in the right way. If the effect sizes noted in the experiments were to generalize to the real world, virtually costless changes to the language used to offer carbon offsets would represent large monetary gain. In the US, for example, if the costs of the offsets in the study perfectly mimicked the contributions in the real world, contributions would range from USD 115.8 to 305.6 million per year. In India, the contributions could range from USD 4.8 million to 14.8 million. While these are idealized illustrations of impact, they indicate that minor changes to the way in which something is framed could lead to significant fundraising achievements.
Ee Hwee Lau is a PhD student in London Business School’s Organisational Behaviour PhD Programme. Her research interests focus on mindsets, status, and decision-making, including how people think about the resources that they have access to but can be concealed from others and have helped them along their path to success. She also examines whether the universal mindset (i.e., the belief that nearly everyone has high leadership potential) would debias people's persistent preference for more attractive candidates.
Aneeta Rattan is Associate Professor Organisational Behaviour at London Business School. Her research interests focus on mindsets and intergroup relations (stereotyping, prejudice, and inequity). She studies mindsets that promote belonging, commitment, and achievement among minorities and women in the face of stereotypes and implicit bias. She also investigates the mindsets that help individuals, organisations, and societies foster positive interactions among diverse group members (across gender, race/ethnicity, and sexual orientation status), even after incidents of explicit bias.
