How to Save the World | The Psychology & Science of Environmental Behavior

How to Save the World is a podcast about the psychology of what gets people to do eco-behaviors and take climate action: Environmental engineer, designer, and author, Katie Patrick, hunts down the latest behavioral science literature from top universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Stanford to unearth the evidence-based teachings you can use to rapidly get more people to adopt your environmental campaign, program, or product.

How to Save the World is a podcast about the psychology of what gets people to do eco-behaviors and take climate action: Environmental engineer, designer, and author, Katie Patrick, hunts down the latest behavioral science literature from top universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Stanford to unearth the evidence-based teachings you can use to rapidly get more people to adopt your environmental campaign, program, or product.

This is the second part of the conversation with Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin AND the Executive Director of The Institute for Diversity Science, Dr Markus Brauer about what makes up real evidence-driven gamification. 

Markus is the social scientist behind a behavior-change game called Cool Choices - a card game that gets workplace employees into groups with the goal of competing around energy and environmental behaviors.

Markus gives us an understanding of the theoretical underpinning and real causal mechanisms that drive the psychology behind the kind of gamification that does succeed in our quest for real and measurable change.

We explore his paper published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology titled: Making Cool Choices for Sustainability: Testing the effectiveness of a game-based approach to promoting pro-environmental behaviors.

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How to Save the World is a podcast about the psychology of what gets people to do eco-behaviors and take climate action: Environmental engineer, designer, and author, Katie Patrick, hunts down the latest behavioral science literature from top universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Stanford to unearth the evidence-based teachings you can use to rapidly get more people to adopt your environmental campaign, program, or product.

Games sound fun, but do they really work to get people to actually do climate and eco-friendly things? And if so, why do they work? 

Today's we’ll be talking with Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin AND the Executive Director of The Institute for Diversity Science, Dr Markus Brauer about what makes up real evidence-driven gamification. 

Markus is the social scientist behind a behavior-change game called Cool Choices - a card game that gets workplace employees into groups with a goal of competing around energy and environmental behaviors.

Markus gives us an understanding of the theoretical underpinning and real causal mechanisms that drive the psychology behind the kind of gamification that does succeed in our quest for real and measurable change.

We explore his paper published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology titled: Making Cool Choices for Sustainability: Testing the effectiveness of a game-based approach to promoting pro-environmental behaviors.

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How to Save the World is a podcast about the psychology of what gets people to do eco-behaviors and take climate action: Environmental engineer, designer, and author, Katie Patrick, hunts down the latest behavioral science literature from top universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Stanford to unearth the evidence-based teachings you can use to rapidly get more people to adopt your environmental campaign, program, or product.

In this episode, I explore the power of pledges in driving pro-environmental action and behavior. Pledges are seen as commitment devices, where individuals make promises or commitments to themselves or others.

We highlight the effectiveness of pledges in engaging people and closing the value action gap. The episode delves into the various forms of pledges, such as written notes, online commitments, or public displays, and discusses the astonishing evidence from behavioral literature on their impact.

Pledges can increase engagement in actions by 30% to 70%, making them powerful tools for maintaining eco-friendly behaviors and winning environmental campaigns.

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How to Save the World is a podcast about the psychology of what gets people to do eco-behaviors and take climate action: Environmental engineer, designer, and author, Katie Patrick, hunts down the latest behavioral science literature from top universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Stanford to unearth the evidence-based teachings you can use to rapidly get more people to adopt your environmental campaign, program, or product.

In today’s episode, we dive into the surprisingly powerful effect of social norms that seem to almost effortlessly shift environmental behavior. Social norms mean“This is what everyone else is doing” or “Here’s an example of what we want you to emulate.”  

Our guest today is research psychologist Dr Alessia Dorigoni from the Neuroscience Consumer Lab at the University of Trento in Italy. Alessia is not just a psychologist through, she’s also a fine artist and behavioral economist specializing in nudges.

We explore Alessia’s recent paper titled "Water bottled or tap water? A descriptive-social-norm based intervention to increase a pro-environmental behavior in a restaurant"

The type of norms we’ll be exploring how a written norm, in the form of a poster in a restaurant, that said "2/3 PREFER TAP WATER" effectively encouraged people to order less plastic bottled water. 

Alessia and I talk about the theory of nudges, the neuroscience of why norms work, and the surprisingly best formats in which to describe the data to have the most psychological influence.

In this episode I offer an alternative strategy to shaming or criticizing small individual eco-friendly behaviors. I explain how you want to see social change like a staircase with many levels. Often taking a small individual action, like using a paper straw or driving less, is the first step a person makes on their staircase of influence. The goal is to inspire the person to step up from their small individual actions to a new set of more advanced actions that have the power to influence many people, instead of only one person (themselves).

Please share this episode every time you see an environmentalist shaming or criticizing small green individual actions! We need to get better and encouraging people to move up the staircase, not shaming them for being at the first stair. This is a design challenge for us all.

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How to Save the World is a podcast about the psychology of what gets people to do eco-behaviors and take climate action: Environmental engineer, designer, and author, Katie Patrick, hunts down the latest behavioral science literature from top universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Stanford to unearth the evidence-based teachings you can use to rapidly get more people to adopt your environmental campaign, program, or product.

Have you considered the power that lies in heavily niching down by geography? As in, go hyper local, and then geographically niche some more.

In this episode, I share my thoughts on the mistakes I've observed by social change projects diluting their impact by spreading too broad. You might get followers by casting a broad net in the beginning, but you won't get the serious and measurable change you want to see from real humans doing real things *off* the internet.

The keys to change lie in starting by seeing what you can change in your immediate location, and then once you've done it, try and replicate it. That is how social movements that built into tipping points are built.

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How to Save the World is a podcast about the psychology of what gets people to do eco-behaviors and take climate action: Environmental engineer, designer, and author, Katie Patrick, hunts down the latest behavioral science literature from top universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Stanford to unearth the evidence-based teachings you can use to rapidly get more people to adopt your environmental campaign, program, or product.

In this episode, I explore the ongoing debate between individual and system actions in promoting pro-environmental behavior, challenging the notion that these are the only two types of actions. This episode points out that there are five different types of actions that can bring about change: daily recurring habits, big-ticket once-off changes, lifelong career mastery, political engagement, and social influence.

Individual actions are more than small lifestyle changes, such as composting or using a reusable straw. The actions a person can take are vast and varied, and each version of the five types explored here are part of achieving systems-level change.

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How to Save the World is a podcast about the psychology of what gets people to do eco-behaviors and take climate action: Environmental engineer, designer, and author, Katie Patrick, hunts down the latest behavioral science literature from top universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Stanford to unearth the evidence-based teachings you can use to rapidly get more people to adopt your environmental campaign, program, or product.

People often ask me why we should practice individual environmental behavior change when what we really need is "systems change." It's not an easy question to answer. We need "systems change" implemented by governments as policy (like plastic bans), economic levers (like a carbon tax), and physical infrastructure (like bike paths). Yet, all systems are made up of networks of individual people who influence systems and are allowed individual freedoms. The two cannot be separated.

In this episode, I talk about the social and political dynamics of government-enforced systems change. No two environmental scenarios are the same and each needs to be solved with a different approach to influencing individual people to take personal actions (like composting) and governments to bring in policy (like providing compost pick up). 

I see environmental psychology as a way to implement structural change across millions of people in a way that succeeds - because the solution is designed to harmonize with the human mind. In this way, systems change IS behavior change. 

I categorize scenarios into what I'm calling the "six buckets" that range in government involvement to help clarify the various arrangements of government control and individual freedoms that come with environmental change.

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In this episode, I unpack six unconscious assumptions that people make when they ask me the question "Why do we need to study individual behavior when we need system-level change?" There is often some flawed thinking in the way this question is asked. While it's true we need systems-level change, this doesn't undermine, nor is it in opposition to, the role of behavioral psychology. Before we can give a thorough answer, we need to question the assumptions and expectations behind the question.

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How to Save the World is a podcast about the psychology of what gets people to do eco-behaviors and take climate action: Environmental engineer, designer, and author, Katie Patrick, hunts down the latest behavioral science literature from top universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Stanford to unearth the evidence-based teachings you can use to rapidly get more people to adopt your environmental campaign, program, or product.

In this episode, I share a new journaling practice that I've recently started that involves answering four specific questions. This practice has been an absolute game-changer for me, and I believe it can profoundly impact your life and work too.

Inspired by her previous episode on the Fun-O-Meter, I emphasize the importance of asking meaningful and substantial questions to shape the trajectory of our lives. These questions are designed to align the inner compass of your environmental work and creative flow toward your true purpose in a way that delivers the best energy, ideas, and momentum you have to change the world.

Take out a journal and start brainstorming your thoughts on these four master questions:

1. What's "The Big Why" behind what you do?

2. What's the amazing vision, destination, and goal you are working towards? What is the "vast and endless sea" you are inviting people to join you on?

3. What's the most fun thing you could do to work towards this goal?

4. What's "The One Thing" you need to do now to make it happen?

Push yourself to write 10, 20, or even 100 responses to each of these questions. If you're busy, just write down one answer to each. This practice will set your direction in the most authentic and resonant path for you. This is the place all the best momentum, ideas, and progress comes from.

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How to Save the World is a podcast about the psychology of what gets people to do eco-behaviors and take climate action: Environmental engineer, designer, and author, Katie Patrick, hunts down the latest behavioral science literature from top universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Stanford to unearth the evidence-based teachings you can use to rapidly get more people to adopt your environmental campaign, program, or product.

Don't let your audience walk away without actually doing anything. Here's the action design shorthand you need. Use each of these evidence-based techniques in your project, campaign, or startup to ensure every person you touch goes on to take a real action that shifts the numbers.

This month's guest expert on the How to Save the World podcast is Nicole Sintov, Associate Professor of Behavior, Decision-Making, and Sustainability from Ohio State University.

We'll be interviewing Nicole on her published research paper, "Guilt consistently motivates pro-environmental outcomes while pride depends on context."

The gist of this research shows that telling people they are performing worse than most others on environmental and climate action, stimulates people to do better.

We'll dig into the question, "Should we be showering people with compliments and positive feedback about their good efforts, or are we better just telling people when they are doing a bad job?"

Not that we need to ONLY make people feel guilty, but negative feedback gets a bad wrap and tends to be avoided, but there’s definitely a strong role for it - and it needs to be a tool in the toolbox of change.

MeshMinds makes planet-themed augmented reality games designed to massively increase engagement and social media sharing of environmental campaigns.

Kay and Olivier and I met when we were working for UNEP on the Clean Seas campaign. They do some really interesting work using the software Spark AR (that’s only used for instagram and Facebook applications) to make these very novel, light, immersive, and fun experiences - kind of like a mini or micro game - that people access by pressing the star icon on Instagram.

And holey moley, the things they make really work! Their game-like creations on Instagram have gotten millions of plays, shares, and viral marketing spreading by mastering this novel approach to engagement.

In this episode, we'll be diving into various creative ways you can use Spark AR and some of the theory to getting your project to really work.

Today's guest is environmental psychologist, Veronica Champine, PhD Candidate and Graduate Research Assistant at Colorado State University.

We're breaking down the science of "social diffusion" in her research paper "Understanding individual and diffusion behaviors related to native plant gardening" recently published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology.

Her research explores the difference between asking people to take individual action vs asking people to talk to people around them and showing by example - that's social diffusion - an often missing link in many climate programs and startups.

We'll be diving into the power and nuance of helping people to get better at diffusing environmental behaviors in their communities - and what we need to do to become designers of social diffusion.

We can get better at telling the story of sustainability, climate, and greener futures. I wrote down these 24 evocative words, backed by science to motivate people, and riffed on ideas of how you use each of them to tell better stories to get people to join your environmental project. We need to be able to inspire epic feelings in people. Here are some examples of how you can do it. 

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We need to avoid the trap of getting caught up in a single idea. Ideas are plentiful. When it comes to climate or social change, an idea is just a hypothesis. Will your idea actually create the change you think it will? You'll only know by testing it. 

In this episode, I talk about how you need to have lots of ideas and rapidly iterate them. You need to test them and discover the causal mechanism of what works on people. The faster you can test and iterate, the faster you can get to the mechanisms of what people love and why they change. Work on your vision of the future world and less on your "idea." 

You need to tell the world why your idea or mission matters – and not just in any way. You need to tell a story that deeply resonates so that people will fund you, work with you, and take action to support you. In this episode, I talk through the power of using The Hero's Journey template to tell your non-fiction story – and how discovering this twelve-step structure dramatically changed the course of not just my environmental work,  but my life, and how it might change yours, too.

People come to me with all sorts of elaborate ideas to "change the world," like games, festivals, art projects, films, and apps.

Often, these ideas have little connection to how the idea will make a real change happen on the ground once people have "experienced" the idea . . . (i.e. "I suppose we'll just put a link somewhere, then people will . . . ")

This entrepreneurship model is back-to-front. If you have an idea to make an impact, you need to forget your crazy idea and go straight to a real human being and get them to make the change you are hoping your idea will influence them to make. Talk to ten people on your street. Call every person you went to school with. Talk to your dad's golf buddies. Get them to do a real thing and observe what it takes.

I'm calling it the ACTION DESIGN THRESHOLD. Pass it before you write any code or spend any money - or before you even have an idea at all. Use Slack, Google lists, Zoom, Instagram, Canva, Figma, and Discord. Do it using your own email and your own phone number.

Just get a real human to do a real thing in the real world. You can do it with a conversation, a party, a poster, or a sticker. Create a 21-day challenge. Offer free consulting calls. Start a group. Just get out there and practice making change happen by talking to a human in real life.

Once you've succeeded in getting your first real human to do the action, then try and replicate it with two humans. Then try and get ten humans to do it.

What will it take to scale your actions from ten humans to 100 humans? Look for a pattern and an opportunity. What kind of actions do you need to design this scaling for? This is your idea that will work.

Any idea you have before you get ten real humans to change is probably a junk idea. At the least, it will need much pivoting. And if you can't get ten people to make a change from a conversation with you and any simple tools you give them, or you don't have the networking and marketing skills to find these ten humans, there's no way your idea will fly in a theoretical future when you have millions in funding.

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Do you ever hear animals you never see? Secretive and rare animals, such as Eastern bristlebirds, can be most easily found by the sounds that they make. We can only do this, however, if we learn how to decipher their calls! 

In her PhD research, Jessie is exploring how to design future technologies that support people in becoming familiar with identifying bird calls from audio recordings. Birders and members of the public explored Jessie’s research prototypes, such as the Bristle Whistle Challenge. Conservationists and members of the public are likely to benefit from having enticing tools that include creative playful and task-oriented gameful interactions with bird calls. Such tools may support many people, whether learning calls for fun, or to support citizen science, ecology, or wildlife conservation efforts.

Jessie mentions these apps:

Fold IT - Protein folding game https://fold.it/

Zooniverse - https://www.zooniverse.org/

Rorshak ink blot test - http://rorschachinkblottest.com/

e-Bird app - https://ebird.org/about/ebird-mobile/

Frog ID - https://www.frogid.net.au/

I-Naturalist - https://www.inaturalist.org/

Otter-AI - https://otter.ai/

Cornel Lab of bird sounds - https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/

Xeno Canto bird sounds - https://xeno-canto.org/

Cat Tracker - https://cattracker.org/cat-tracker/

Does your website, pitch deck, and marketing material ACTUALLY explain what you do, clearly? Or is it a confusing word salad of environmental world-saving generalities? Remember this phrase: "If you confuse, you lose." In my experience, most climate and environmental projects struggle to simply explain what they do. In this episode, I explain how to write a "power sentence" in three easy steps so anyone can immediately "get it."

You need to follow the steps to write this power sentence because clarity is what creates the emotional connection with your audience. It's what will get people to fall in love with your project and want to sign up, donate, join, purchase, and share - because they instantly understand what it is. 

We'll also learn how to use the basic framework of The Hero's Journey to write a single paragraph that will hook people in to your story and tip and tricks on how to write better. 

Clear succinct copywriting is the secret to growing your movement. 

Imagine using augmented reality outdoors on a real city street to re-imagine the street and buildings around you covered in plants, trees, green walls, cars-free - or whatever your eco-future imagination can dream up.

Our guests today are Sebastian Schlecht and Robin Roemer. Sebastian is an architect from Germany who co-founded the Lala Ruhr project - an urban design lab that re-imagines cities with biophilic nature-based solutions. Robin is the co-founder of the software startup CityScaper which specializes in augmented reality and urban planning.

Sebastian and Robin got together and created this world-first AR project where people could hold up an iPad or iPhone and see a greenified ecotopia version of the street they were on - and they could even design their own.

This style of augmented reality is that it’s embedded into a streetscape’s geo coordinates - and that requires creating a 3D model of the street and geolocating the ecological design to fit with the exact location where the user is standing.

We’ll be taking a deep dive into the tech stack that includes Lidar, GIS, and Google AR Core, with Robin about 20 mins in.

Connect with Sebastian and Robin on LinkedIn: 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastian-schlecht-fromgreytogreen/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/robin-roemer/

The Lala Ruhr Lab https://www.lala.ruhr/en/start-en/

City Scaper https://ar-gument.de/

We talk with environmental psychologist Anaïs Voşki. She's a researcher at Stanford University studying the effect that seeing the Earth from space has on astronauts' climate change attitudes and their sustainable lifestyles back on Earth. Her recent published research paper is titled “The Ecological Significance of The Overview Effect: Environmental Attitudes and Behaviours in Astronauts.”

The Overview Effect is an experience whereby people, especially astronauts, increase their environmental concern when viewing the Earth as a singular object from space. The Overview Effect is credited with not only influencing astronauts directly but also as being a keystone moment in cultivating the modern environmental movement.

Before the first moon landing in 1969, no photograph of the Earth had existed. These first photographs of Earth, coined the "pale blue dot," are thought to have elicited a new kind of environmental connection that had not existed before. 

Anaïs and I talk about the deeper experience of ecological transcendence that is embodied in The Overview Effect and how it could be applied to the practical design of encouraging more climate action and sustainable behaviors in the wider public.

In this episode, Katie talks through the latest published research from The Journal of Environmental Psychology Issue 79. She explains the psychological concepts and behavioral science principles in the studies and shares her thoughts on how they can be practicably applied to real-life programs, startups, and campaigns. 

1:17 Self Contol Skills Are More Important to Eco-Behaviors Than How Much People Care About the Planet Paper: When and how pro-environmental attitudes turn into behavior: The role of costs, benefits, and self-control 

6:12 People Have No Idea of the Climate Impact of Various Behaviors And Meat is the Big Ticket CO2 Item Paper: Knowledge, perceived potential and trust as determinants of low- and high-impact pro-environmental behaviours 

12:48 You Need to Tell People "**Everyone Else Around You** Supports Renewable Energy Policy" Paper: Effects of perceived social norms on support for renewable energy transition: Moderation by national culture and environmental risks 

16:05 Practicing Gratitude for Nature Will Help You Do More Eco Behaviors Paper: Gratitude to nature: Presenting a theory of its conceptualization, measurement, and effects on pro-environmental behavior 

19:54 Imagining Yourself Being Old Makes People Take Better Care of the Planet Now Paper: Enhancing environmental resource sustainability by imagining oneself in the future 23:01 Making People Feel Proud AND/OR Making People Feel Guilty About Their Eco-Behaviors Works  Paper: Pride and guilt predict pro-environmental behavior: A meta-analysis of correlational and experimental evidence 

In this episode, Katie talks through the latest published research from The Journal of Environmental Psychology Issue 79. She explains the psychological concepts and behavioral science principles in the studies and shares her thoughts on how the findings can be practicably applied to real-life programs, startups, and campaigns. 

2:19: People Who Care About Other People, Also Care About the Planet Paper: Self-construals and environmental values in 55 cultures 

4:37: Do This To A Menu and All the Meat-Eaters Will Order Vegan Paper: Menu design approaches to promote sustainable vegetarian food choices when dining out 

8:26: When Packaging Design Cues An Environmental Action Paper: A meaningful reminder on sustainability: When explicit and implicit packaging cues meet 

10.09 Quirky Novel Actions LIke Using Soap Nuts Can Break Other Bad Eco-Habits Paper: Doing Laundry With Biodegradable Soap Nuts: Can Rare and Novel Habits Break Bad Habitual Patterns?  

15:26 Personal Experience of Climate Disaster Makes People Support Climate Change Mitigation Paper: Exploring how climate change subjective attribution, personal experience with extremes, concern, and subjective knowledge relate to pro-environmental attitudes and behavioral intentions in the United States 

18:18 Telling People It's Eco-Friendly Doesn't Really Work Paper: The Limited Impact of Positive Cueing on Pro-Environmental Choices 

20:46 Being Rich and Able to Consider Long Term Future Helps to Consider the Planet Socioeconomic status, time preferences and pro-environmentalism 

23:45 How To Stop People Flaking Out (Moral LIscencing) After They Do a Few Good Deeds Paper: Regulatory focus and self-licensing dynamics: A motivational account of behavioural consistency and balancing 

How to Save the World is a Podcast About the Psychology of What Gets People To Take On Sustainable Behavior and Climate Action. Environmental engineer, designer, and author, Katie Patrick, hunts down the latest behavioral science literature from top universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Stanford to unearth the evidence-based teachings you can use to get magnitudes more people to adopt your environmental campaign, program, or product. Sign up for Katie's free behavior and gamification design course at katiepatrick.com 

Get a copy of How to Save the World on Amazon This podcast is supported by our friends at Earth Hacks who run environmental hackathons, Conservation X Labs who promote community-driven open tech development for conservation, and Climate Designers - a network of designers who use their creative skills for climate action. You might enjoy joining their communities and events.

This episode is about testing if putting people into groups and asking them to compete towards an environmental goal works to get the group members to increase their environmental behavior, compared to asking people as individuals can often fail to get people to take the action. Group competition (like we see in sport) is a powerful psychological mechanism that has been largely untapped by the sustainability profession and it could be harnessed to reach our climate goals. 

Our guest today is Assistant Professor Laila Nockur Ph.D. from Aarhus University in Denmark. She recently published a paper titled “Fostering Sustainable Behavior Through Group Competition.” She specializes in the study of the "social dilemma." It's a tricky incentive problem that plagues most environmental change missions. A social dilemma means that to do something for the greater good (which ultimately helps everyone), each individual person has to make a personal sacrifice. These problems all involve an "environmental commons" - a resource we all share like the air, climate, streets, oceans, and forests. Laila's research shows how we can override the vexing problem of the social dilemma by putting people into groups and asking groups to compete against one another to reach an environmental goal. 

You’ve probably heard people say that "You just need to make (an environmentally polluting thing) expensive." Monetary incentives DO work to motivate people, but how much and for how long? And are there other more effective ways to change behavior than literally paying people to go green?

In this episode, I speak with professor Florian Kaiser. He’s a former Co-Chief-Editor Journal of Environmental Psychology; Professor of Personality and Social Psychology; Otto-von-Guericke University; in Germany and he’s published many many papers on how environmental attitude influences behavior (which aren’t always the same thing) and some of the less obvious difficulties in getting financial incentives work to drive pro-environmental behavior.

Professor Kaiser explains the deeper nuances of how attitude drives behavior from his research into The Campbell Effect. We explore why the value-action gap can be untrue, and how sustainability program designers can't isolate a single behavior out of the context of a person's wider environmental value system. Behavioral nudges, gamification, and incentives work, but they work best on people with high environmental attitudes - and with an environmentally attuned audience, the behaviors will stick long term. His insights illustrate that we can't short-change the development of a person's deeper environmental attitude and jump straight to simple behavioral incentives if we want to achieve deep and permanent social change. 

Professor Kaiser's LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/fgkaiser/

Professor Kaiser's Published Research https://www.ipsy.ovgu.de/ipsy/en/fgk-path-980,1404,31,196-p-210.html

Jan's research papers here:

Are you getting sick of messages of climate doom and dystopia? There’s another way to talk about the future.

In this episode, I'm chatting with Professor Joshua D. Wright on his fascinating research into the power of the “environmental imagination” and how it drives both practical behavior change as well as political action. It’s about communicating “solutions” instead of “problems” – and it makes a dramatic difference to how people respond to the information, form groups, and lead movements. The effect of thinking of an alternative world is more subtle and nuanced than it seems.

I think this might be the first research investigating the effect that looking at, and thinking about, ecotopian futures has on our pro-environmental behavior. I have a hunch that this research might be part of a growing zeitgeist of people moving out of overwhelm and into empowerment and agency over the future of our planet.

Find his paper here https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272494420306885

What is environmental leadership? Everyone who is trying to improve the world needs to activate people to do things they have not done before – and every time you are trying to persuade people (especially many people) you are practicing the art of environmental leadership. In this episode, I go through 14 specific things you need to do in order to activate a group of people to make change happen. These techniques are based on the social science of group dynamic theory, social network analysis, social imitation, tipping points, behavioral science, and good ol' human bonding. 

There are many climate and sustainability-themed groups that meet regularly to learn, talk, and network. These groups are nice, but this style of group fails at implementing the core principles that can make a group a powerful force for change. 

You've probably heard that famous quote by Margaret Mead, "Never think that a small group of people can't change the world. It is in fact, the only thing that ever has." By implementing the 14 techniques in this podcast, you'll be able to step up as an environmental leader of a group (even if it's just a group of a few friends), activate other humans around you, and have the kind of influence in the world you want to have. You might be surprised at how quickly it works!

I may host an environmental leadership workshop sometime soon. Send me a DM or email at kp@helloworlde.com if you like the sound of it! 

In order to build a new world, we must first imagine what it will be. In the episode, I created a guided meditation you can use to enter a deep state of relaxation which allows you to experience different brain frequencies that bring out new creative ideas, visions, and inspiration that isn't possible while using your regular "busy" executive functioning style of thinking. Take a quiet 35 minutes of uninterrupted time to listen to this meditation. The meditation will take you through a body scan followed by a guided story that will help unlock your creative energy and shine a light on how you'll use it to transform the world. 

In this episode, we're chatting with Professor Jaap Ham. He's a leading cognitive scientist who researches how people respond to seeing their electricity use displayed with colored lights that glow red if you used too much electricity, or green if you are saving energy (also known as "persuasive technology" or "ambient signaling").

His research has shown that colored light is one of the most effective ways to influence people to change their behavior: red=bad, yellow=ok, green=good. Then why aren't we using colored light as a design tool to encourage more pro-environmental behavior? The evidence suggests that we should be. 

Professor Ham also studies how robotic cats help people to change their energy consumption. The toy cat smiles when you use less, and frowns when you use more – evidence shows it’s a surprisingly powerful way to change behavior.