Abstract
Tackling over-consumption of resources and associated emissions at the lifestyle level will be crucial to climate change mitigation. Understanding the public acceptability of policy aimed at behaviour change in this domain will help to focus strategy towards effective and targeted solutions. Across two studies (n = 259, 300) we consider how policy approaches at different levels of governance (individual, community, and national) might be influenced by the inducement of hypocrisy and the activation of social norms. We also examine the influence of these experimental manipulations upon behavioural intention to reduce consumption (e.g., repair not replace, avoiding luxuries). Dynamic social norm framing was unsuccessful in producing an effect on policy acceptance or intentions to reduce consumption. Information provision about the impact of individual consumption on global climate change increased support for radical policies at the national level (banning environmentally harmful consumption practices) and the community level (working fewer hours, sharing material products, collaborative food cultivation), yet the inducement of hypocrisy had no additional effect. This is in contrast to individual-level behavioural intentions, where the inducement of hypocrisy decreased intentions to engage in high-consumption behaviour. This paper concludes with implications for low-consumption governance.
Highlights
The world is experiencing drastic changes in its climate system, with the scientific community in agreement on the severity of climate change risks [1] and the need to avoid these risks for human societies and ecosystems [2]
Inducing social norms was not effective in this study, which could be due to a weak manipulation or a boomerang effect
Alterations were made in order to create a more obvious distinction between the policy options and make them more relevant to different levels of governance and policy approaches
Summary
The world is experiencing drastic changes in its climate system, with the scientific community in agreement on the severity of climate change risks [1] and the need to avoid these risks for human societies and ecosystems [2]. One-quarter of global emissions are linked to the consumption and production of material products such as clothing, vehicles, electronics and household items [5] and we will need to reduce our consumption of these material goods in order to help tackle this problem effectively as part of an emissions reduction strategy. The most effective way of reducing waste and mitigating the upstream problems associated with material extraction and production is to avoid consumption in the first instance [6]. Without direct policy initiatives from the UK government to tackle over-consumption beyond waste management and technologically driven efficiency gains, there is an increasing likelihood that our consumption levels, and associated emissions (and other social impacts), are going to continue to grow
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