What sort of person would act sustainably?

Recently on this blog I asked the question ‘Are you what you do?’ – how far is our identity tied up in our working lives?The question crossed my mind again this week when Tony Hayward, boss of BP, declared he’d like the oil spill to end because ‘I’d like my life back’. It might seem a nuanced point compared to the loss of life, environmental destruction and economic disaster now facing the Gulf of Mexico, but I couldn’t help noticing that he seemed to refer to his life as something outside his work. Does his very highly paid job not constitute a core part of his life? Or does it only do so when things are going well?

Whatever you think about that, the question of our identities and how we create them is endlessly fascinating. It comes up again in the new book “Switch – How to Change Things When Change is Hard” by Chip and Dan Heath, which is about overcoming our inbuilt resistance to change.

For those of us trying to work on the systemic changes we need to transition to a sustainable way of life, there’s lots in the book on which to reflect. They prescribe, for example, getting in touch with people’s emotions to provoke change: does a graph showing rising carbon parts per million stir the soul sufficiently to provoke such a change in people? They also suggest helping set the path – not just arguing for change but showing what people need to do.

But they also get into the notion of identity and the need to get people to rethink their identity so that they become the person who acts in the new way.

They give as an example a (very sneaky) psychology experiment from the 1960s. Two psychologists – Jonathan Freedman and Scott Fraser from Stamford University – got a researcher to go door-to-door in a neighbourhood and ask people to put a sign up on their lawn saying “Drive Carefully”. The sign was a real eyesore and only 17 per cent of people said yes. However, in a parallel experiment they went to houses first with a petition which they asked people to sign which said “Keep California beautiful”. They returned two weeks later to ask about the sign, and about half of them said yes – an increase of about three-fold.

Freedman and Fraser concluded: “Once [the home owner] has agreed to the request, his attitude may change, he may become, in his own eyes, the kind of person who does this sort of thing, who agrees to requests made by strangers, who takes action on things he believes in, who co-operates with good causes”.

I think this is highly relevant for the sort of behaviour changes we’re trying to create – whether at the societal, organisational or individual level. So what sort of person would act sustainably? And how do we get more people to take on that identity?

Defra’s framework for pro-environmental behaviour divides the public into seven clusters, each sharing a distinct set of attitudes and beliefs towards the environment. The model looks at the sorts of intervention that could be effective for each cluster. But what if we tried to move people into different clusters? If we understand what makes people identify as ‘Positive Greens’ and more importantly how we get more people into this category, they will be more likely to decide to change behaviours for themselves.