The need to belong is a powerful driver of our behavior. In this module, you’ll learn how to use social norms to ensure that environmental behaviors spread and are durable.

Why do you save energy? Is it to protect the environment? Benefit society? Save money? Because others are doing it? If you’re like most people, you don’t believe that knowing what your peers are doing has much, if any, effect on your behavior. However, although people tend to underestimate the degree to which others influence their own behavior, social norms are among the most powerful motivators of behavior change. In this module, you’ll learn how to use social norms to ensure that environmental behaviors spread and are durable.

Even the smallest inconveniences can stop behavior change in its tracks. In this module, you’ll learn how to make environmental actions easy to reduce the intention-action gap.

How many of us have waited until the last minute to file our taxes? How many times have you stopped filling out a form when it took too long? In today’s busy and ever-changing world, we are asked to take many different actions every single day and even every hour. To optimize our limited time, attention, and energy, we often take the path of least resistance. Even minor inconveniences, or hassle factors, can cause us to move on to easier or more pressing matters. In this module, we discuss tips for making the desired behaviors as simple, seamless, and convenient as possible. We’ll also explore adding friction to make undesirable behaviors difficult to complete.

Facilitating habit changes requires great effort by practitioners, but can reap long-lasting benefits for the environment. Learn how to design initiatives that break bad habits and build positive ones.

Have you ever driven halfway to work without even realizing it? While learning a new behavior, like driving a car, requires focused concentration, with frequent repetition the brain creates neurological pathways that reinforce a pattern to the point where the behavior becomes so automatic we don’t have to pay attention at all. Because our brains are constantly trying to save time and energy, the “path of least resistance” subconsciously guides much of our daily behavior. This module provides a variety of tools to support our target audiences in building durable positive habits by shaping the first actions toward change, introducing new contextual cues to trigger desired actions, and reinforcing these actions with practice, feedback, and incentives. This chapter also provides a variety of tools to support breaking habits by disrupting old cues and response links.

In this module, you’ll learn how to jumpstart your audience members’ motivation to take action by aligning your initiative with what they care most about.

We all have things that we’re attached to, such as the people, animals, or places that we love the most, certain activities, and our culture and customs. When we care deeply about something, we experience powerful emotions that motivate us to protect or preserve it, and we prioritize the things that are in line with the morals and ideals that guide our judgments.

However, we sometimes lose sight of how integral our environment is to all the things we are attached to. In this module, you’ll learn how to help your audience see the connection between the environmental issues you work on and the people, experiences, places, values, morals, and ideologies that they are attached to.

In this age of information overload, competition for people’s attention is steep. You’ll learn how to design initiatives that are vivid so that your audience notices, pays attention to, and remembers your messages long enough to take the desired action.

Why do we notice and remember some things, while others “go in one ear and out the other”? In our fast-paced and technology-driven society, we are bombarded by messages competing for our attention every day—from billboards, to pop-ups on our phones, to signs in the grocery store. The sheer volume of information—all of which claims to be important—results in information overload and, ultimately, attention fatigue. We simply can’t process and respond to all the messages presented to us—even those about things that are truly important to us. Given the critical importance of what information is most noticeable and memorable, environmental practitioners face a critical challenge and opportunity. To be successful, we must design initiatives that not only take attention fatigue into account, but also overcome it. This module is about how to overcome attention fatigue by making our messages as noticeable, engaging, and memorable as possible.

Tapping into our desire to behave in alignment with our identities is a powerful driver of behavior change and for galvanizing environmental champions. You’ll learn various methods for doing this, including how to design commitment campaigns.

We each carry multiple identities, such as that of a student, sibling, professional, or parent. Each identity is shaped by our individual expectations for ourselves and by the expectations placed on us by others. If we fail to fulfill the expectations associated with our identity, we risk the inconsistency disappointing ourselves or others. Our drive to be consistent with our most strongly held values and societal roles shapes every aspect of our lives, including how we interact with others, how we respond to messages in our environment, and how we behave on a daily basis. This module provides tools to leverage your audience’s drive to be consistent with their identities so as to encourage environmental behaviors.

Optimism is crucial for maintaining motivation in the face of daunting environmental challenges. You’ll learn how to activate hope and inspire action by strengthening your audience’s sense of efficacy.

Sea levels are rising. Wildfires are blazing out of control. Species teeter on the brink of extinction as ecosystems are threatened by human activity and a changing climate. When this is all we hear about the environment, it’s no wonder we find ourselves feeling overwhelmed or even paralyzed. The truth is, most of us do care about the health of the planet, but many environmental issues feel daunting, abstract, and outside of our individual control. These feelings are amplified when environmental practitioners highlight the catastrophic nature of a problem, guided by the mistaken assumption that this strategy will not only grab people’s attention but also make them more likely to act. In this module, you will learn to empower your audiences through active optimism: the kind of optimism that is rooted in action. Active optimism isn’t just about believing that the outcome will be positive, it’s also about feeling empowered and capable of taking action to make that outcome a reality. This kind of optimism is a crucial driver of transformational, enduring environmental change.

We are motivated to engage in behaviors when we feel that the benefits outweigh the costs. Learn how to choose incentives wisely to attract people to positive environmental behaviors and deter them from negative ones.

In an ideal world, everyone would be motivated to engage in environmental behaviors all of the time. Everyone would believe that the costs of the environmental behaviors (like the extra time it takes to sort our food into compost bins) are outweighed by the benefits (like the reduced emissions from food in landfills), even if those benefits will be realized far into the future. However, in reality, few of us are sufficiently motivated by distant, diffused, or intangible rewards. Sometimes your audience will require an extra incentive to make the benefits of environmental behavior outweigh the costs and to overcome the psychological and social barriers to behavior change. In this module you will learn the best practices for designing and delivering rewards and penalties to motivate positive environmental behavior.

Framing information in a way that activates meaningful mental associations is essential for encouraging a shift in mindsets toward environmental engagement. You’ll learn about frames that have already been tested, how to avoid detrimental frames, and how to test your own metaphors and frames.

Would you rather buy meat that is 75% fat- free or meat that is 25% fat? When presented with these options, most people showed a strong preference for the 75% fat- free option, even though both choices represented the same product, with only a difference in how the information was framed. We are framing—whether intentionally or not—every time we communicate. The words or images we choose, the metaphors we invoke, and the information we highlight all activate certain mental associations in the minds of our audience. These associations are often deeply rooted as beliefs, values, morals, narratives, and ideologies. All information is processed in the context of the associations that are active in people’s minds, and facts that don’t resonate with these active associations will be misinterpreted or ignored. Therefore, framing your communications to activate specific mental associations is the most effective way to communicate truth to your audience. In this module, we discuss both short- and long-term aspects of framing, including how to deal with misinformation and anti-environmental frames, how to frame for short-term action, and how to shift mental associations in the long term.

You’ll learn about the role that exposure to nature, other-focused emotions, mindfulness and awareness of cognitive biases play in fostering a change in our underlying relationship to the environment and its inhabitants, thereby durably transforming behavior.

What about the type of transformational change that can shift the mindset of an entire society? People need intrinsic motivation–motivation that arises from within–to continue to take action for the environment long after our initiatives are gone. In a society that values productivity and economic output above all else, it’s hardly surprising that we find it difficult to slow down, to connect with nature, and even to know ourselves. In addition, we are continuously bombarded with bad news – and, as climate change accelerates, the news will get worse before it gets better. At worst, we may find ourselves isolated in a “bubble” that causes us to lose our empathy and compassion for others and nature. This loss of connection can lower our long-term motivation to care for others and protect our environment, making the barriers to behavior change even harder to overcome. This module discusses how to change mindsets by building intrinsic motivation to protect the environment. Activating intrinsic motivation is essential to creating permanent, transformational changes in how we live on this planet. This is by no means a quick fix, but it is an enduring one.