How do we reinforce climate action?

Abstract

Humanity has a shrinking window to act on climate change, yet climate action is severely lacking. We argue that it is because interventions to promote climate action have largely neglected the basic principles of behavior change from an operant conditioning perspective. In this paper, we propose a generative operant conditioning framework that uses positive and negative reinforcement to encourage low-emission behaviors and positive and negative punishment to discourage high-emission behaviors in domains of travel, food, waste, housing, and civic behaviors. This framework also offers a parsimonious account to explain positive and negative spillovers. This framework provides an effective recipe to design individual-level and system-level interventions to generate and sustain high-impact climate action across multiple domains.

The i-frame and the s-frame: How focusing on individual-level solutions has led behavioral public policy astray

“…The field of behavioral science needs a better framework to outline the conditions under which negative and positive spillovers are likely to occur, as a recipe to design effective, complementary, and mutually reinforcing i-frame and s-frame interventions. As a start, we have proposed a unifying framework to account for positive and negative spillovers from an operant conditioning perspective (Zhao, Radke, Chen, Sachdeva, & Luo, 2023). Specifically, we argue that positive spillovers occur because the previous behavior has been positively reinforced and generalized (e.g., by social or symbolic rewards, or identity reinforcers like warm glow), and negative spillovers occur because the previous behavior has not been positively reinforced.…”

i-Frame interventions enhance s-frame interventions

“…The field of behavioral science needs a better framework to outline the conditions under which negative and positive spillovers are likely to occur, as a recipe to design effective, complementary, and mutually reinforcing iframe and s-frame interventions. As a start, we have proposed a unifying framework to account for positive and negative spillovers from an operant conditioning perspective (Zhao et al, 2023). Specifically, we argue that positive spillovers occur because the previous behavior has been positively reinforced and generalized (e.g., by social or symbolic rewards, or identity reinforcers like warm glow), and negative spillovers occur because the previous behavior has not been positively reinforced.…”