What would encourage you to take the bus instead of driving your car? Or to use less electricity in your home?

Environmental psychologist Wokje Abrahamse says there are some effective – and less effective -ways to encourage people to change their habitual behaviours.

Wokje Abrahamse is an environmental psychologist at Victoria University of Wellington. It’s an area of research, she says, which broadly looks at peoples’ relationships with the natural and built environments.

She is interested in how to foster environmental engagement and encourage people to lead more sustainable lifestyles.

“I look at what motivates people to engage in pro-environmental behaviour, what are the barriers … and how can we know how effective behaviour change interventions are,” says Wokje.

Getting people to do things differently is hard – we all know how difficult it is to change our own behaviour.

Social norms

She says people are often guided by social norms, or what other people do. For example, she says, in Wellington many people say thanks to the bus driver when they get off a bus – and newcomers to town learn it’s the norm and simply copy what everyone else does.

Wokje comments that a similar thing happened in 2020 on public transport before wearing face masks became compulsory.

“I caught myself looking around, asking myself how many other people were wearing a mask and should I be wearing one?”

The use of social norms has been effectively used to encourage people to save electricity.

“When you know that you neighbours are saving energy or electricity, then studies have shown that’s an effective way to encourage behaviour change,” says Wokje.

Tailored information

Goal setting and feedback are useful ways to encourage behavioural change.

But simply providing information is not enough to change beliefs or behaviours, says Wokje.

Information can increase awareness, she says, but it does not automatically translate into behaviour change.

Tailored information, however, can be quite effective. In one study designed to encourage energy conservation, Wokje says they gave each household specific tips on how to save power. So a household without a dishwasher would not be told how to use their dishwasher more efficiently, as that wasn’t relevant to them.

As part of the same study, the researchers tried to encourage families to travel by car less and use public transport or walking and cycling more often, but Wokje says this was harder to achieve.

“Transport choices are very habitual and habits are hard to break,” says Wokje.

She was also involved in a Wellington project to encourage car pooling, and in that case the development of a web site which allowed people to easily identify other people they could share rides with encouraged greater uptake of car-pooling.

Listen to the full story to hear about more tools to help you change your old habits for new ones.