You are most likley thinking that you are one person in the world, therefore why should YOU change your behaviour to be sustainable in actions, as “they won’t make a difference”. However, action of individuals produce over 40% of carbon emissions. Knowing this fact, would you then change your behaviour to be more sustainable?
Dr Neil Jennings the student switch off manager aims to change lots of peoples attitudes towards energy. This campaign aims to teach students good energy habits. How do we do this… how do we get Jeremy Clarkson to drive less and rugby players eat less?
Neil uses the value action gap which focuses on transcribing motives into ice cream incentives with Student Switch Off.
Pro-environmental model
Many students may act on this, resulting in pro-social behaviour, which aims to:
“minimise negative impacts of our behavioural actions to the natural world”
However this may not correlate environmental values with meaningful actions. Another tactic Neil employs to reach a wider audience, is social media and peer-to-peer engagement. This social marketing tactic is well suited to behaviour change, (McKenzie Mohr & Smith 1999). Student Switch Off has been shown to cut energy consumption by over 7%. As a psychology student I understand that positive incentives are effective in engaging a wide range of students, instead of the “usual subjects” transcending “the gap”.
This gives students their own sense of responsibility. In the workshop a keen group of students from all over were tasked with thinking of an alternative to a scenario. Taking on board Neil’s points we looked for campaigns with high empathy and altruism to get pro-social behaviour and according to psychology it then results in our voluntary internal behaviours aiming to benefit many.
We came up with ‘Quack-on’, in order to reduce water use in halls of residence. This would involve timers in showers, mechanical sensors and automatic switch offs. OK so this behaviour change campaign might need a bit more work but we thought it was a good start.