Are people lying about how green they are?

How to think about the gap between our intentions and actions when it comes to sustainability.

Hello and welcome to the inaugural issue of Curious Behaviour, a weekly newsletter focused on human behaviour, technology, business, and society but with regular detours into the weird and idiosyncratic.

I think a lot about this quote by E.O.Wilson:

“The real problem of humanity is we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology”.

This newsletter is a place to write about how we might navigate this challenge, touching on business, culture, our relationship with technology and how we go about changing behaviours at scale.

Each week I’ll either share some original thinking on a big(ish) topic, or links to inspirational and thought-provoking content I’ve come across.

This week, we’re diving into why there is such a disconnect between what we say and what we do, especially when it comes to sustainability. I’d love too hear your thoughts, comments and feedback.

Liar, liar planet on fire

As a behaviour change nerd I go into facial spasms when I see a lot of market research on sustainability. Headlines like “Generation Z is generation green: 73 percent of those surveyed would pay more for sustainable items” have always felt suspect to me.   

Partly because they usually rely on attitudes and intentions captured in a simple survey, asking broad questions about big topics.  Whereas we know from the behavioural and social sciences (who have long studied this ‘say-do gap’) that these sorts of questions are terrible predictors of behaviour.¹

But I also find these headlines unbelievable because we are simultaneously confronted with behavioural evidence to the contrary, in the inexorable rise of really-really-fast-fashion from the likes of Shein, now one of the most profitable fashion companies in the world.

So it was refreshing to see this research from The New Consumer that explicitly called out the disconnect between self-described values and behaviours, in this case by Shein shoppers.

When I posted this to LinkedIn a few weeks ago as a reminder that attitudes, opinion and intentions don’t necessarily equate to behaviour, it sparked a really interesting discussion about WHY this gap exists, and how we should interpret it. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

The most uncharitable and depressing interpretation is that people are just straight up lying (to researchers, to friends, to themselves) about what is really important to them. Let’s call this the economist’s interpretation: our behaviour ‘reveals’ our true preferences. 

And while the example above relates to Shein, this ‘say-do’ gap is a perennial challenge facing the broader sustainability movement, as well as other big behaviour change challenges such as obesity.²

So are we all lying arseholes?

Even if we probably exaggerate just how much we care about virtuous and important topics, there’s lots of evidence that most people care about the environment. 

Instead of assuming people are liars that don’t really care, I believe there are three more significant factors behind this Say-Do Gap in sustainability:  green choices are currently too confusing, too difficult and too unattractive.

1. It's morally virtuous but incredibly confusing

‘Sustainability’ as a concept sounds important and aspirational.  Who doesn’t want to 'protect the planet' and co-exist with nature?  Birds tweeting, mother earth, rolling hills.  Lovely stuff.

But scratch beneath the surface and it’s incredibly confusing and ill-defined. 

I’m reading Hannah Ritchie’s new book ‘Not the End of the World’ (highly recommended) and she recounts having lunch with her old university environmental lecturer who mansplained that he was fine to choose lamb because the local provenance of the meat meant the climate change impact was small. And yet, as Hannah explains, this is incorrect logic as food miles are only a fraction of the environmental impact. 

If academic experts who teach this stuff get it wrong, what hope do the rest of us have??

This means it’s easy to say 'yes sustainability is important' when asked, whilst being really unclear what that actually means in practice.

Lastly, the fact sustainability relates to all living systems, every supply chain on the planet and a million different behaviours obviously does us no favours here.

It makes it very easy to get caught out as being inconsistent.  

“Oh you're vegan and never fly? What about that Aga in your cottage you fucking monster?!”

2. People have good intentions but the system is against them.

There are lots of ways in which our current society, economic system and supply chains are stacked against us when it comes to behaving sustainability, but the two most obvious are effort and cost.

We may have great intentions but underestimate the effort involved. Perhaps learning new meat-free recipes is a bigger pain than you envisaged, or public transport in your local area is rubbish, or your work expects you to frequently travel long haul.  Our choices sit in a system and society that makes it much easier to act in ways destructive to the environment - from urban planning, to govt taxes and subsidies, to social norms, to regulation to popular culture.  The default is dirty rather than clean.

We may have great intentions but simply can’t afford it. Far too many people are priced out of a conversation about sustainability. A colleague recently tried to get down from Edinburgh to Milton Keynes for a client workshop and a last minute flight was £45 whilst a train ticket was £400. Despite his willingness to be inconvenienced, he just couldn’t justify the cost.³

3. Sustainable choices involve too many trade-offs.

To paraphrase Walt Whitman, “we contain multitudes”.  Yes we care about the environment, but providing for our family, minimising hassle, looking attractive, fitting in, saving money, and having fun are all important too.

Greener options often require trade-offs between these multiple priorities: it’s sustainable OR cheap, sustainable OR convenient, sustainable OR effective.  

And compared to cost, performance or comfort, the benefits of sustainability are rarely as attractive or visceral.  We may pay the costs immediately and individually for a sustainable choice, but in many cases the benefits are experienced far in the future and are shared collectively (e.g. cleaner air, reduced global warming, and conservation of natural resources).  

As long as sustainable choices are either/or decisions, pitting a rather vague future benefit  against much more immediate (dare I say “selfish”?) benefits like cost, performance, comfort, convenience or social status, then businesses and governments will have a tough time trying to convince people.

So what can we do about it?

We started by wondering why there is a gap between people’s stated values and their behaviour.  And we’ve found that when it comes to sustainability, it’s very easy to be supportive in principle, but incredibly difficult to put that into practice.

Getting people to care even more about climate change is not going to close this gap.

Instead of selling green values, we need to make green behaviours more buyable.

Here are three places to start…

1. Make the green choice more attractive

I recently worked with a bank to develop new business models and propositions to get their customers to improve the energy efficiency of their homes (e.g. insulation, heat pumps, solar panels). We found that whilst framing energy upgrades as the ‘green’ or ‘environmentally friendly’ choice was attractive to some, a framing around more everyday benefits such as lower bills, or a warmer home, or more energy independence all had much wider appeal.⁴

These were even the preferred frames for self-described ‘passionate greens’, because it allowed them to win over partners and family members who cared less about the environmental benefits.  Giving them more reasons to say “Yes” made the decision less of a trade-off.  More AND, less OR.

To achieve mass behaviour change in the way we live, shop, buy, travel, eat, and heat, the greener choice must have more going for it than simply being green.  

The rise of second-hand fashion and reselling is a great example of this. Circularity is not the only benefit.  As the CMO of Depop, Pete Semple said recently, “the green option not only needs to be accessible, it needs to be exciting”.

Yes this requires a huge level of innovation across policy, technology and business models.  Governments need to create the right enabling environment for businesses and citizens to create solutions that are exciting and attractive . It will take time and effort and collaboration. But it’s essential.

Because if we’ve learned anything in design, innovation and the behavioural sciences over the last 100 years, it’s that things that are difficult, expensive, and confusing don’t do very well.

2. Stop worrying about being right, start focusing on being effective.

Another inconvenient truth in the sustainability movement: we don’t just want people to change behaviour, we also want people to agree with our worldview and reasons for acting. We have a need to be right, not just effective.

But maybe we need to be open to the possibility that people might make the ‘right’ decisions for the ‘wrong’ reasons.  Like those eating less meat for health reasons, or shopping second-hand for style reasons, or buying an EV for their tax efficiency. 

Focusing less on worldview and more on making green behaviours easy, cheap and attractive might mean less people identifying as passionate greens, but more people behaving in ways that help the planet. 

3. Start asking better questions

Asking people if they care about climate change has its uses.  It can show governments they have permission to step up and do something, for instance.

But it’s misleading to suggest to businesses that these attitudes are evidence of latent demand for premium green products.  Willingness-to-pay studies are useful but easy to do badly, as anyone who has launched a new product will testify.  Asking people if they’d pay more for generic ‘more sustainable products’ is far too vague to be useful, when so many of our decisions are contextual. 

These simple studies also neglect other forms of behaviour change that don’t involve purchasing a new green product. Perhaps the change is refraining from buying at all. Or not buying as frequently, because you’re repairing or taking more care. Perhaps you're sharing. 

The headlines from this type of research are probably less clickbaity, but it’s the research business, government and civil society needs.

Don’t despair

Sustainability is a big, confusing, and virtuous response to a big, confusing and terrifying climate crisis.  Of course people say it’s important.

However acting in concrete ways that are less environmentally destructive is difficult, expensive, and often involves trade-offs and compromises.  

Therefore we need to make the green choice cheaper, easier and more attractive.  This might mean reframing the options we have but it absolutely means huge levels of innovation across policy, technology and business models.

The good news is that we don’t necessarily need people to self-identify as passionate environmentalists to act sustainably.  

Rather than make people care more about the climate, we need the green option to be so accessible and so attractive that it’s chosen by those who couldn’t care less.

Please let me know your thoughts in the comments.  I’d particularly love to hear of your favourite studies and research that sheds more light on the challenge and possible solutions.

Until next week, thanks for stopping by.x

1. For example, evidence suggests that intentions are better predictors of behaviour when the questions are very specific: relating to brands and models, to existing products vs new products, comparing specific brand names to competitors, focusing on short-term rather than long-term, and on product trial rather than total sales.

2. Arguably the say-do gap was first identified in 300 BC when Aristotle came up with the term ‘Akrasia’ to describe our failure to follow through on our intentions.

3. Cost really matters.  A recent huge study which analysed results from 430 different studies on what works to change pro-environmental behaviours found that financial incentives and social comparisons were the most effective, whilst information / education was the least effective.

4. Businesses can’t do this alone.  We also found, unsurprisingly, that governments had a huge role to play through incentives and regulation to create an enabling environment that made it easier and more attractive for businesses, landlords and homeowners to do the right thing.