Affect and Impact Neglect in Sustainable Decision-Making

Abstract

In a recent special section on Sustainability and Emotion, Schneider and van der Linden present how sustainability science could benefit from affective science to address important unanswered questions about the psychological and affective antecedents of people's engagement in relatively high-impact sustainable behaviors. Here, we underline the importance of combining the motivational role of positive affect with an impact-focused research agenda to understand the causal role of affect in sustainable decision-making and to develop communication strategies harnessing affective mechanisms to promote impactful sustainable behaviors. We present potential links connecting affective experience with perceived impact and adoption of sustainable behaviors. Finally, we argue for communication strategies aiming to enhance positive affect associated with high-impact behaviors.

Psychological research has so far shown how individual-level factors such as climate change beliefs, values, norms, and risk perceptions relate to pro-environmental behavior (Steg, 2023). However, we currently lack empirical evidence on the causal role of affect and emotions in perception of and engagement in high-impact sustainable behaviors (Brosch & Steg, 2021; Schneider et al., 2021). The articles in the invited special section offer valuable insights into how affective science may address some important social sustainability questions (Brosch & Sauter, 2023). Schneider and van der Linden (2023) laid out outstanding questions and arguments about the role of affect in sustainable decision-making. They highlight (1) the need for an investigation into self-reinforcing feedback loops between positive affect and pro-environmental behavior, (2) the importance of understanding engagement in high- vs. low-impact behaviors, and (3) the benefits of studying the variation of emotions in diverse settings. Here, we further highlight the importance of fusing the motivational potential of positive affect with an impact-focused research agenda to understand the affective roots of people's perceptions of and intentions to engage in high-impact behaviors and to develop affect-focused interventions to promote impactful behaviors.

The Role of Affect in Impact Neglect

The estimations of mitigation potentials of human behaviors (Ivanova et al., 2020) would ideally help individuals to identify high-impact (e.g., flying less) and low-impact behaviors (e.g., recycling) to make informed choices. However, people have a poor understanding of the relative impact of mitigative behaviors (Camilleri et al., 2019; Cologna et al., 2022; Wynes et al., 2020), which suggests that consumers, even when they intend to engage in pro-environmental behavior, may not make the most effective choices. This indicates an impact neglect in sustainable decision-making and behavior. ¹ Various psychological and cognitive factors may influence people's engagement with high-impact behaviors (see van Valkengoed et al., 2022). In the following, we argue that affect is a potential factor driving impact neglect. Hence, understanding the interplay between affect, perceived impact, and climate action is necessary to increase impactful behavioral mitigation.

Affect experienced as a feeling state can guide judgment and decision-making by assigning value to the object of judgment seemingly causing the affective experience (Clore & Huntsinger, 2007; Slovic et al., 2007). Studies have shown that risk and benefit judgments can be influenced by affect (i.e., affect heuristic; Slovic et al., 2007). For instance, positive affect may increase perceived benefit while negative affect can have an opposite effect (e.g., Finucane et al., 2000). Considering affect heuristic in sustainability domain, we argue that having positive affective reactions to a sustainable behavior may boost its perceived beneficial impact. Moreover, positive affect resulting from acting “green” is also an important driver of climate action (Jia & van der Linden, 2020; Taufik et al., 2016; van Der Linden, 2018). Combining these lines of research, we argue that affective reactions to sustainable behaviors can at least partially account for the impact neglect seen in sustainable decision-making and behavior: As Schneider and van der Linden (2023) explain, anticipated and experienced positive affect associated with a behavior can be an antecedent and a consequence of sustainable behavior forming a positive feedback loop (see Figure 1 in Schneider & van der Linden, 2023). In addition to this, the affect heuristic would predict that having a positive affective reaction to a behavior may further increase its perceived benefits. Thus, the same mechanism proposed in the target article may at least be partly responsible for an enhanced perceived beneficial impact for the behaviors that are readily adopted by the individual, which are often low-impact behaviors that are also usually less difficult to complete (Asutay et al., 2023). This could be problematic because a potential self-reinforcing loop for a relatively low-impact behavior may decrease the likelihood of adopting a high-impact behavior. After all, people have limited resources, and feelings of satisfaction and positive affect may signal that they are doing better than expected for sustainable goals (Carver, 2015), which may lead to coasting and shifting resources towards other goals (Louro et al., 2007). Thus, positive affect experienced from undertaking low-impact behaviors may reinforce individuals in an ineffective sustainable behavioral pattern. On the other hand, a positive feedback loop for one behavior may lead to a spillover effect motivating individuals to adopt other sustainable behaviors. Even though recent evidence suggests that behavioral spillover effects are generally negligible, the outcome may differ depending on the context (Geiger et al., 2021; Maki et al., 2019). Thus, research on affective sustainability should investigate various positive and negative downstream consequences of affective reactions associated with sustainable behaviors.

Impact-Focused Affective Sustainability Science

How can we address the impact neglect? Interventions aiming to increase knowledge with logical arguments and statistics may have limited effects (e.g., Lindauer et al., 2020). Moreover, if an individual believes that a low-impact behavior they adopt has a substantial impact in reducing emissions, information to convince them otherwise may decrease experienced and anticipated positive affect demotivating the individual to engage in the behavior, which may not be the desired outcome. Hence, information-based interventions should ideally strive to refocus affect to help form positive associations for high-impact behaviors. However, interventions should be considered with great care and rigorously tested as one strategy that works for one behavior may not be as effective for another. For instance, a successful strategy in harnessing the motivational potential of positive affect for a habitual behavior such as reducing car transport may not generalize to behaviors that involve a one-time investment such as installing solar panels. Also, the individual's existing impact knowledge is likely a moderating factor for effectiveness of interventions (van Valkengoed et al., 2022). Thus, future research efforts should focus on uncovering the causal role of affect in sustainable behavior in context.

In line with the target article, we argue that affective science has a lot to offer in the sustainability domain. However, the empirical evidence showing the causal role that affect plays in sustainable decision-making is currently lacking. Hence, it is critical to study the underlying affective causes and downstream consequences of sustainable decision-making. It is also equally important to understand how factors operating at other levels such as climate beliefs, social norms, impact knowledge, perceived difficulty of adopting sustainable behaviors, and structural context (e.g., infrastructure and incentives) influence the role of affect in sustainable behavior. For instance, perceived difficulty due to psychological and structural barriers may prevent a feedback loop from forming in the first place. It would also be beneficial for an affective sustainability science to define how a positive feedback loop operates: would the individual increase their sustainable efforts through experienced and anticipated positive affect (by adopting other behaviors—spillover effects) or would a sustained engagement (by keeping a certain level) constitute a positive feedback loop? These theoretical questions are interesting for future research.

Similar to Schneider and van der Linden (2023) and others (Nielsen et al., 2021a; 2021b; Whitmarsh et al., 2021), we think that high-impact behaviors should be promoted and suggest that understanding affect and emotions as motivators of behavior are crucial to reach that goal. Such an impact-focused affective sustainability research should strive to understand (1) the variation of affective reactions to both habitual and one-time high-impact mitigative behaviors, (2) how these affective reactions are influenced by individual (e.g., beliefs, values, motivations, resources, and knowledge), social (e.g., norms and trust-based networks), and systemic (e.g., infrastructure and incentives) factors, and (3) the causal relationships between affect, perceived impact and difficulty, and adoption of high-impact behaviors. As Schneider and van der Linden (2023) pointed out, it is necessary to combine large-scale longitudinal surveys and decision-making experiments with affect induction and assessment to reach these goals. Moreover, a systematic investigation into the role of affect in impact neglect may generate insights into how to communicate about sustainability issues in a way that emotionally resonates and affectively engages to reinforce individuals in impactful behavioral patterns.