Guilty environmentalists: targeting the value-action gap

As students studying environmental issues, we find ourselves in a little bit of a sustainability bubble. The more we learn about the complexities of the problems of climate change, the more we push each other to change our lifestyles and “do our bit” for the environment. It seems common sense to us that informing people about how their choices impact the environment would change behaviours for the better.

Unfortunately, it’s pretty commonly accepted now that providing information by itself doesn’t do much to encourage pro-environmental behaviours. Presented with bleak images of a future where coffee and chocolate are commodities of the past, even self-proclaimed environmentalists can retreat within themselves and fail to take action. You can’t blame anyone for doing this: facts and figures about climate change can be pretty disheartening.

This is usually referred to as the “value-action gap”: truly believing we need to make efforts to mitigate climate change but not actually making any efforts yourself. The argument is one you’ll have probably heard before: how much difference can one person really make? why should I make an effort when nobody else is?

The Common Cause Foundation’s Perceptions Matter report (2016)[i] surveyed the British public on their identification with “compassionate” and “selfish” values. Compassionate values are things like “equality,” “social justice,” and “forgiveness”; where selfish values include “wealth,” “social status,” and “ambition”. These are values everybody identifies with to some extent – the report doesn’t split the UK into “compassionate” and “selfish” people! Instead, the idea is that some people, at different stages in their life, prioritise more selfish values than compassionate, or vice versa.

The Foundation asked whether people saw themselves identifying with generally compassionate or selfish values, and then asked what they thought most of the British public identified with. About ¾ of the British public said they generally identified with more compassionate values and also believed most of the British public identified with selfish values. The stark difference in perceptions of our own values compared to others was plotted on a graph (below).

The problem is that an identification with more “compassionate” values has been linked to a belief in the importance of environmental protection. It’s also been shown those with more compassionate values are more likely to take action to protect the environment. If most British people think the rest of the public has “selfish” values, it really would appear fruitless to adopt more pro-environmental behaviours, since you expect nobody else will bother.

With our behaviour-change theatre, this is one perception we want to change. We want the experience to be informative, but also social, experienced with others also learning about how our waste is sorted and processed. Being around other people engaging and caring about recycling, we hope to create something like the environmentalist bubble we have experienced during our studies.

We’re purposefully not appealing to “selfish” values like wealth, which is a common tactic we see nowadays ("Insulate your home, you’ll save money on energy bills!" "Use a Keep Cup and you’ll get a discount on your coffee!") While people do care about saving money, appealing to people’s bank balance will only work so long as people are saving money. Instead, we’re targeting compassionate values, such as empathy and caring for others. We want people to experience our theatre pop-up within a group, and also to think about what the staff in recycling facilities actually have to do when sorting our waste.

Rather than using reusable coffee cups because they’ll save you money, we want people to think instead about reducing their waste for its environmental benefits. Targeting compassionate rather than selfish values, we also hope to foster a sense of environmental responsibility that will inspire action.

Ideally, we will change the behaviours of those who wouldn’t describe themselves as environmentalists in the first place, but if we only manage to reduce the value-action gap, inspiring some environmentalists disillusioned by bleak visions of our world impacted by climate change, we’ll feel like we’ve made a difference.

[i] Common Cause Foundation (2016). ‘Perceptions Matter: The Common Cause UK Values Survey.’ Available at: http://valuesandframes.org/survey/