 Welcome to the Michigan Minds Podcast, a quick and informative analysis of today's top issues from University of Michigan faculty. This is Caitlin Ramey. I'm an assistant professor at the Ford School of Public Policy here at Michigan. So I have three broad areas of research. I study how people compare their own beliefs and behaviors to those of others. I study how adopting one pro environmental behavior affects people's likelihood of taking on more behaviors in the future. And then I also look at how climate change communication affects people's understanding of climate change, how it affects their behaviors, and also how it affects their support for climate related policies and technologies. So some of that is studying what people often call social norms. So how learning about how other people act and think affects your own behavior. So I'm particularly interested in climate change and environmental behaviors. And so I have some work looking at how being told how your own carbon footprint compares to peers might motivate people to reduce their carbon footprint in the future. I'm working on a study now looking at electricity feedback using social norms. You may have gotten different utility companies sometimes give you information about how you are using electricity, but also how your neighbors are doing so. And so we're looking just starting a field experiment to see whether the neighbors is the most important reference group or whether there's maybe other kind of comparison groups that could also get people to reduce their electricity consumption by wanting to keep up with the Joneses. And then I also within that I look at how people compare their own beliefs to others so I do a lot of work on what I call belief superiority so people's beliefs that their own opinions are more objectively correct than everyone else's and superior to everyone else's and what that means for our willingness to listen or work across the aisle or consider alternative views or estimate our own knowledge. So sometimes it's about comparing people's behaviors to others so having people fill out report information about how they act and the things that they're doing to try and reduce their own carbon footprint and then giving them information about how that stacks up against peers. But with the beliefs what we have people do is actually just rate their attitudes on given topics, and then have them say how much more correct they think their beliefs are to other people's views on this topic. And so we get measures of both like what they believe but also how they think that stacks up. And we use that combined information to assess how superior they feel about whether it's an environmental issue or any other issue. So climate change is one of these really complex issues that's really hard for us to wrap our heads around. And so, for a lot of us we have maybe very low levels of information about it or, you know, we have some inkling but it's kind of based in a shallow kind of way. And what that means is that climate change is something that's really open to both misunderstandings and misinformation. It's not like everybody has their own really in depth working knowledge of this. And so the way we communicate about climate change can have a really outsize effect on what people believe about it. And so some of my work has looked at ways to communicate about climate change that don't just play into the political polarization that we see around it that's one of the issues is that, you know, we have camps based on our political views and climate change is really pulling into that trap. And so it can be an uphill battle to talk to people because they don't want to listen to you if you are on the wrong team. And so there's a lot of distress there. But there are ways to talk about climate change that don't feed that so much so for example, talking about climate change as akin to a medical disease seems to be a potential way to talk about climate change that, you know, there are lots of situations where we have to make decisions in when we don't have all the information when there's uncertainty about what exactly is going to happen. But that, you know, the experts are, you know, you can get a second opinion about things and people are agreeing about what's been happening so far and so using that kind of a frame can can be a little bit depolarizing which is helpful. But we also find that, you know, sometimes what people react to is not so much the idea of climate science but the solutions that are proposed to deal with it. A lot of these solutions are really big government solutions so if you're politically conservative that might not be, you know, a type of action that you want to take on. So I think it's really about, you know, other solutions like private sector initiatives or technologies that could help climate change may be a way to, you know, talk about the science without it being immediately aversive, if you don't like big government. It's important to look through the communication sense because people's understanding is so shallow that there are lots of opportunities but lots of risks in the way that we communicate this. And so I think if we don't pay careful attention to how we're communicating about climate change, we could do more damage and get people to really, you know, this is an issue that's very easy for people to ignore if they're not seeing the effects in their daily lives, they're not recognizing the effects in their daily lives. And so I think it's really important to convey accurately what is going on and what can be expected in ways that mesh with people's existing values and the things that they care about because it will affect those things. And sometimes people assume that if you get, if you just get people to do one behavior, that that means that they're then going to become an environmental person and then they're going to do all these other good behaviors you just get them to recycle and they'll, you know, then they'll start composting and they'll switch out their lights and they'll support a carbon tax. And sometimes people make the opposite assumption they say like why are you telling people to like not use plastic straws that's such a waste of time. They're reminding support for carbon tax and big meaningful changes that are what we actually need. And so there's these wild assumptions that go in both directions. The research is really mixed in terms of what ends up happening so this is called pro environmental spillover just one behavior spillover into the other. Some studies find evidence for positive spillover so if you get people to do that first behavior they're more likely to take on a second behavior. Other studies show negative spillover. So, we've done a lot of work to try and figure out when and where those occur it seems like positive spillover is more likely if you can get people to think about the intrinsic joy they get from the behaviors that actually enjoying doing the behavior can lead them to take on secondary behaviors. Things like guilt might not be so good that might need to lead to more negative spillover because people just don't enjoy that. And so the method that you that interveners use to get people to do the first behavior may affect their likelihood of doing others. So when I've been involved with nonprofits and governments it's usually been to help them with interventions that they're trying to do around behavior change. The Tennessee Department of Energy wanted to try and get people to reduce their phantom load use which is like when you have things plugged in to sockets that aren't being used how can you get people to unplug those because that's a waste of energy. Or I worked with keep America beautiful they wanted to assess the effectiveness of a recycling campaign. So these are all kind of things where people want to do something that's policy relevant like reducing energy use or increasing recycling, but they realize that the people that they're trying to change are people and they have behaviors that they're individual behaviors that they're trying to change. And so what I do is kind of try and help them shape interventions that are based on the psychology of what we know about what motivates people to change their behavior and avoid some of the pitfalls that we know that campaigns sometimes do so one of the big things the bad things that the people sometimes do is to talk about how everybody's doing the wrong thing. Because that makes it seem like it's a bigger problem which it may be but telling the public that everybody's doing the wrong thing actually just makes them think well everybody else is doing this bad thing and so I should join in to do so if I want to be like my peers I should also waste energy and not recycle and all that stuff so that's a good thing to avoid doing, and that's the type of thing I help try and guide people with a lot of the issues that I look at that are policy or political issues and people are very quick to get into fights about those and be really kind of aggressive and trying to convince and persuade people, and they often try and use, you know the reasons that they think that this is important or that they think that this policy is awful or great in order to convince others and that is failing to recognize that those other people may not share the same values and may not, may have different priorities it's not that they have, they just don't have information it's that they actually believe something else. So I think it's really important if you're going to try and persuade someone else to first kind of understand where they're coming from and try and understand what their values and the things that they think are important are before you try to persuade them to your view. So going at it in a really telling people that they're wrong is is never something that's super effective I think, giving people information in terms of that they care about can be effective, but kind of shaming and scolding is not the way to go. The other topic is on this idea of belief superiority so. And what we see is that people who people who hold more extreme positions on any given topic tend to feel more superior about their beliefs on that topic. And people who feel really superior about their beliefs are really hard to budge they are much more likely to engage in selective attention which means they're only paying attention to information that agrees with their point of view they're very good at ignoring information that disagrees with them or people. They mitigate people who disagree with them they think that they know a lot more than they actually do on a given topic they overestimate their knowledge. And luckily, that seems to be a fairly small proportion of people out there who who think that their views are highly superior. And so I think, sometimes I think, if you're trying to persuade groups of people. Take your battles, and not worry about those people who hold their beliefs with more superiority because it's very hard to change those people. But there's a lot of movable people in the middle who may not have strong beliefs or maybe more open to alternatives and I think, you know, directing energy there is often the most fruitful way to go. If you're thinking if you know if you're out there and you're trying to change people's behavior I think it's really important to think about not just the immediate behavior that they that you're targeting but also how that could affect other behaviors and try and help people do in a way that's sustainable, and not just environmentally sustainable but like that they'll repeat them in the and take them on to other future behaviors. So helping people to enjoy new behaviors or to find value in them, and not guilt trip them into it is a good way to go. I think, you know, communicating in ways that is in line with people's values and figuring knowing your audience, both in terms of how extreme those attitudes are and what they care about is really important. And just really talking to your peers about this is not something we've really talked about that much, but peer to peer communication is really important. So if we're thinking about social norms we do things that we think other people are doing, and we don't do things that we think other people aren't doing and one of those things is talking about climate change. So one of the really, if you are somebody who cares about climate change. One of the best things you can do is talk about it with your friends and neighbors and family members because they may be under the impression that you don't care because you haven't talked about it. And we can dispel that particular myth because it turns out a lot of people really do care and are really concerned. So the idea of spillover is I have some work looking at whether individual behaviors can undermine support for policies. So there's often a fear that if you talk about these individual behaviors people won't support policies. And this also comes up when people think about technologies when it comes to climate change so we'll learning about geo engineering which is like technological changes to try and manipulate their Earth's climate on purpose to counteract climate change. There's a fear that learning about that will undermine people's support for government action. And I think, I think a key thing we've learned in the last few years is that yes those things can happen there's crowding out effects can happen. So learning about individual behaviors or learning about technologies can kind of lead people to think that climate is something that they don't have taken care of and they don't need to do the hard or support the hard work of government action, but that that really only happens when people are under the misunderstanding that those things will take care of everything. If you correct that belief and tell people like this is a good step, but it's not sufficient we really need more, like the magnitude of these is not going to be enough to take care of this issue, then the crowding out effects go away. If you are someone who's either communicating about technologies or thinking about how individual behaviors may affect policy. I think the key thing there is just to convey that like these are good steps in the right direction. They're not good enough on their own so this is part of a tool in a toolbox not a silver bullet. Thank you for listening to the Michigan Minds podcast, a production of the University of Michigan. Join the conversation on social media with hashtag youmishimpact.