Song the blog: Nina Simone - Feeling Good

I have a thing for meta-analyses, if you haven't quite gathered that yet. A meta-analysis takes all of the research on a topic and provides a quantitative overview of all of the findings. So, for example, there's a meta-analysis examining the effects of soda consumption on health. You may think it's pretty obvious soda consumption has negative health effects, but a few studies haven't found negative effects (with the caveat that research not finding negative health links tend to be funded by the soda industry). Even when studies all agree, though, there still may be debate about just exactly how strong effects are, such as exactly how bad soda is for your health. 

Meta-analyses have a number of appealing strengths (and some weaknesses, of course). They make it easier to understand a literature that may consist of countless studies. They give us increased confidence in the strength of various relationships (such as the link between soda consumption and negative health outcomes). However, I think meta-analyses have one underappreciated and under-explored strength--the ability to inform policymakers.

For example, how do we talk to people about climate change? In particular, how can we talk to climate change skeptics in ways that make them more open to the consensus climate science? We could just tell people that the overwhelming majority of the scientific community believes in human-caused climate change. We could use analogies to help people understand climate change. We could emphasize how connecting with political conservatives' values, such as stressing how taking care of the environment is patriotic, can make people more concerned about climate change. These strategies, and countless others, have received empirical support. And there are matching media headlines for each study, like this headline, which seem to suggest the magical way to make everyone believe in climate change is simply using the one approach to climate messaging that they covered in their article.

But there's a problem with that kind of narrative--we have a ton of studies all claiming to reveal an effective climate change messaging approach! If you were the communication specialist for an environmental nonprofit, which messaging strategy should you use? You may only get to use one or two strategies. How do pick the most effective approach?

This kind of example is one reason why I believe meta-analysis has a unique ability to inform environmental policymakers (I use the term policymaker to refer to anyone interested in informing people's environmental beliefs and behavior, such as someone working at an environmental nonprofit, the chief sustainability officer at a company, a legislator, or even a concerned neighbor). Like the dendrochronologist counting and interpreting tree rings, meta-analyzers need to more effectively assess and convey the state of research to policymakers. To further this conversation, I recently gave a talk at the Sustainability and Social Science Research Symposium at the University of Michigan (you can find our slides here; Mark Cohen, Michael Vandenbergh, and I also have an upcoming chapter in the Handbook of Sustainability and Social Science Research, which I'll post once it's available).

Here's some of the ideas I discussed relating to how we could use meta-analysis to better inform environmental policymakers. Let's create high quality meta-analytic databases from the beginning. So, what do policymakers need to know to develop more effective environmental policies? Well, they need to know how confident we are that the communication and behavior change strategies we use actually change environmental behaviors. And, relatedly, they want to know how strong of an effect our behavior change interventions tend to have on behavior. One meta-analysis exemplar that assess confidence in, and strength of, environmental behavior change interventions suggests that  information-based home energy interventions, such as providing people with home energy audits, can lead to approximately 7% reductions in home energy use. This is helpful to policymakers. Fortunately, most meta-analyses in the area do a decent job of conveying this information (though we can also certainly improve).

But, is there more we can do as meta-analyzers? Certainly. First, we could improve how we conduct our meta-analyses. One way to do that would be to create online, publicly available summaries of all of the studies on a given topic (e.g., how can we use social influence behavior change interventions to help people become more sustainable?). This would allow policymakers themselves (or scientists working with policymakers) to explore studies that fit their policy context. For example, policymakers could ask which interventions are best for changing household environmental behavior versus best for changing employee environmental behaviors. Policymakers may want to explore different behavior change approaches depending on the context in which they work.

We could also update meta-analytic databases in real time as new studies are released (something we're calling "dynamic meta-analyses"; both similar to and distinct from what the health sciences have called "cumulative meta-analyses"). This would help ensure policymakers are always looking at the cutting edge best practices for influencing behavior. So if 20 studies suggest some overlapping and distinct ways to convey climate change information, and varying in how effective they each are, an updated dynamic meta-analysis would help the communication specialist choose the message approach most likely to work for their policy context. If 20 more studies come out, a dynamic meta-analysis would include the original 20 studies and the new 20 studies, all analyzed together, providing policymakers with updated best practices. And this could happen every time a new study is released. In a perfect world, the policymaker (or the scientist consulting with the policymaker) would use an online interface to request the most current behavior change information for their policy context, and the cutting edge, evidence-based findings would be conveyed in an easy to understand way (somewhat similar to data to text efforts for statistical programs).

These are some of the ideas I explored in my talk. In my opinion, we need to improve how we, as scientists, inform policymakers. Improving our meta-analyses would be a hue step toward that goal, including the development of dynamic meta-analyses that inform environmental policymakers of the latest trends and approaches to behavior change. There would be some difficulties, of course, such as deciding who would curate various dynamic meta-analyses. But, I believe it's an idea we need to more seriously explore. What do you think?

Song of the Blog: Bob Seger - Understanding

Climate change is complex. You have the overwhelming majority of scientists who study climate change declaring it to be largely a function of human activity. But, you also have a nonsensical effort of some media to give both sides of the debate equal attention. After moving through the stages of climate understanding, from “climate change is happening” and “climate change is human-caused,” to “what will its specific effects be?” and “how should we try to address it?,” things get even more complex. What are the key climate change points people need to understand, and how can we help them appreciate these points?

Along with Drs. Kaitlin Raimi and Paul Stern, we recently examined how best to educate people about seven key dimensions of climate change (published recently by PLOS ONE; they also made a nice graphic). We wanted people to appreciate, among other facts, that climate change is human-caused (“anthropogenic”), it’s progressive (the effects will only worsen over time), there are uncertainties about when and where the effects will be the worst, and taking action can help reduce the risks. Now, these are some relatively complex ideas. For example, people need to appreciate that even though the overwhelming evidence is that climate change will get worse over time, we can’t say exactly when we’ll see these negative effects (and to be sure we’re already seeing some), such as sea level rise, and we can’t say exactly how severe the effects will be. These are tricky questions countless scientists and engineers are wrestling with.

This may make it sound like climate change is unlike anything else in our human experience. However, we do actually deal with complex issues like climate change in our lives. One particularly relevant experience is trying to understand and cope with disease. Being diagnosed with cancer, for example, leads to many more questions. What caused it? How and when will it progress? Will treating it reduce or eliminate the risks? Helping people appreciate how climate change resembles medical diagnoses and treatments may improve people's understanding of the seven core dimensions of understanding climate change.

So, in our experimental research people from across the United States read different types of analogies about climate change, to help them appreciate these seven dimensions. In one condition, previously highlighted, they read about how climate change is similar to a medical disease. In another condition, they read about how thinking about climate change was like thinking about disaster preparedness and considerations of disaster insurance. In yet another condition, they read about how understanding climate change is like understanding a complex court trial, with different degrees of evidence for various arguments. Finally, there was a fourth condition where people simply read about climate change without the help of an analogy (treated as the control condition).

So did the analogies help people appreciate the seven dimensions of climate change? In our first study, we found that people tended to find the analogies to be more helpful than just reading about climate change by itself. But, the most promising trends were found for the medical analogy, as reading how climate change resembles a medical diagnosis made conservatives in particular (who tend to be more skeptical of climate change) more confident that climate change is happening and is human-caused, could get progressively worse, is outside the normal range of climate events, that there are trade-offs to mitigating climate change (e.g., personal comfort), and mitigation is required to reduce the chance of the worst risks occurring.

However, science can be messy. As a discipline, psychology needs to do a better job of replicating their research results to increase confidence in the findings (and trust me, it isn’t just a problem for psychology). Well, in a second study we found that the effect of the medical analogies on people’s climate understanding was much weaker, and sometimes the medical analogy didn't affect conservatives’ beliefs at all. Well, what do we do with these inconsistent results across the two studies? This could be part of a much longer conversation, but for the purposes of our article we took the idea of a meta-analysis (synthesizing results across studies and research labs), and conducted an internal or mini meta-analysis. So we used all of the data from the two studies together, to present a more complete picture of the results. And we found that, although the effects were stronger in Study 1 than in Study 2, as a whole conservatives who read about the medical analogy of climate change were still a little more likely to believe in human-caused climate change, that climate change is progressive and unprecedented, that there are trade-offs to addressing climate change, and that mitigation would help reduce the risks of climate change.

Now, there’s room for a lot more research on this topic. For example, are there ways to make medical analogies more effective at conveying information about climate change? We used the exact same medical analogy message in both studies, but maybe that message can be improved or designed to be more helpful, particularly for conservatives. Additionally, are there other types of climate change analogies that are even more effective? And, how do these analogies affect people’s environmental behaviors, not just their climate understanding? Finally, did they use these analogies themselves when talking to their loved ones or friends about climate change afterward? These questions, and others, are questions worthy of future exploration.

What do you think?

Song of the Blog: Daft Punk – Face to Face

Like many of you, I share an office. There are three of us, and we each have our own preferences about office noise, lighting, and temperature. Navigating shared visual and auditory spaces can be tricky, particularly when we occupy them for so many hours over the course of time. While one officemate may prefer complete silence, I enjoy belting out Bob Dylan ballads whenever they randomly pop into my head. While I prefer the lights to be off at all times, normal people like to have the lights on from time to time, particularly when sunlight is weak.

Energy use in shared, public settings, such as offices, is difficult to manage in part because of these distinct preferences. Although you may not control everything in your office, such as the temperature or whether your office has windows, you do control other uses of energy. This includes the level of the lights, use of shades on the windows, use of computers and monitors, and other assorted sources of energy use. And there is often a social component to office energy use, as we can vary on whether we get along with our officemates, how comfortable we feel complaining about the shared energy use, and how we should go about confronting others over that energy use.

But, unnecessary energy use influences environmental and social issues like climate change. One way to improve our energy efficiency as a nation, and help mitigate climate change, is to improve how we use energy in our buildings, including our offices. There are a lot of ways to do this, but the energy decisions of employees are one piece to the puzzle. And with many offices being shared, this means we need to be more willing to discuss our energy use in constructive ways with our colleagues and supervisors.

In a past blog, I discussed how as a culture we could do a better job of discussing environmental issues with other people, and this certainly holds for our interactions with coworkers. We actually know very little about whether someone talks to their officemates about turning off unnecessary office lights, turning off unused computer monitors, or adjusting the thermostat to save energy. So, along with my colleague Drs. Xiaojing Xu, Chien-fei Chen, Bing Dong, and Julia Day, we recently examined who feels that it is easy to discuss saving energy in the office with their coworkers (published recently by Energy Research and Social Science; accepted version here). Guided by a model in psychology called the A-B-C model, or the Attitude-Behavior-Context model, our interdisciplinary research set out to ask how personal (e.g., someone’s attitude) and contextual (e.g., office norms) variables relate to one’s perceptions of how easy it is discuss energy use with coworkers.

Now, using the A-B-C model, people should find it easiest to discuss saving energy at work when they have the right attitude (e.g., they care about saving energy) AND they are in a context that supports saving energy (e.g., their company thinks it is important to save energy). So, we surveyed 245 employees from across the U.S. (from all types of industries and companies), and through both quantitative and qualitative analyses, we found a number of interesting trends. We first asked who was willing to save energy at work. People who thought it was good to save energy, not too shockingly, were willing to save energy at work. They were also more willing to save energy when they did not believe that adjusting the thermostat would make them less productive. And even more so, people who did not think that personal comfort was closely linked to productivity were particularly willing to save energy when the context was right (i.e., the organization supported saving energy). This is similar to what the A-B-C model would suggest.

When did people find it easy to talk to their coworkers about saving energy? Here we found that believing your organization supports saving energy also predicted perceived ease of communication, as did believing that saving energy is good. But, we also found that people who believed it was good to save energy felt it was easy to talk to their coworkers about saving energy when they believed their coworkers approved of saving energy (i.e., a supportive group norm). So, the most likely time when an employee feels like it is easy to talk to their coworkers about saving energy is when that employee thinks it is good to save energy AND they think their coworkers also want to save energy. It makes those potential conversations a lot less awkward if you think your coworker is responsive and supportive.

Now, all of these measures were self-reported – we did not observe whether coworkers or the organization were actually supportive of saving energy. Nor were we able to record actual conversations employees had about saving energy. Future work can help provide many more details about these interactions. But for business owners or supervisors, these results do suggest a path forward for helping your employees save energy in the workplace. Emphasize that saving energy in the workplace is important, make sure people feel like their coworkers care about saving energy, and make it obvious that the organization as a whole prioritizes saving energy. This will not only make it more likely that employees as individuals will save energy, but they should also be more likely to recruit their coworkers to save energy in the office, potentially multiplying the effect of their own energy use decisions.

What do you think?