Jennifer Cole, Environmental Psychology PhD Student, University of Colorado Boulder
Tell us about Environmental Psychology
The Social Psychology PhD at the University of Colorado Boulder is a traditional social psychology program, I’m the only student here interested in the connection between psychology and sustainability. While there is an established field of Environmental Psychology (EP), there really isn’t such a thing as an official degree in EP, you just have to find a good psych program with a good advisor who can support you in this area. Many of my colleagues are studying stereotyping, prejudice, and health behavior research. I’m looking into questions such as how social norms affect whether or not people believe climate change is an issue, what groups of people most influence people’s perception of climate change as an issue, and how people’s feelings about climate change alter in the wake of natural disasters.
How did you find Environmental Psychology as a career?
For my undergrad I majored in psychology and minored in energy and water sustainability. I always knew that I wanted to work on climate change, but I was also super interested in people and why we do the things we do. When I was getting my masters in environmental management, I was researching for my next steps and realized I could combine the two. I’m really passionate about how people relate to nature, how they make decisions about natural resources and why they decide to fight climate change or not.
Tell us about some of your projects
One of my recent studies, which is still in progress, measured how closely people’s perceptions of their political party’s position on climate change relates to their own beliefs. We presented people with a description of a climate policy and gave them information about how peers in their party (Democrat or Republican) feel about it. We then asked them if they would personally support the policy or not. We saw some correlational results, that people’s support for a climate policy generally tends to mirror their political peers’ support for it. We don’t have evidence for a causal link yet, but are working on that research. It’s interesting to know, for example, that if you are a Democrat and all of your Democratic friends are saying they support a particular climate policy, then it’s likely that you will too. These findings are still in progress though and not yet peer-reviewed.
I’m also working on another study that will be a little bit more reflective of the real world. We’ll have participants engage with a fake twitter. We’ll show them some tweets about a climate policy from politicians and other peers in general. We’ll then measure which tweets they like and retweet, and then have them write their own tweet that either supports the policy or not. That will be a little more parallel to the real world in terms of how people interact on these issues.
Another question I’m looking at is determining what groups have the most influence on what people believe. Figuring out whether it’s more effective to say “70% of Americans support this” or “70% of politicians support this” or “70% of your coworkers support this” will really help advocates determine which groups to focus on influencing.
One goal of all of these research projects is to inform climate policy advocates about the best ways of communicating in order to increase support for climate advocacy.
Another question I’m just getting started on looking at is people’s response to media portrayal of natural disasters. Last year’s natural disasters were worse than any previous year – hurricanes, floods, wildfires, all of which were made worse by climate change. The media tends to use humanized language when talking about natural disasters, saying things like “Katrina attacked the coast” or “Sandy devastated the town.” For some reason when disasters are humanized in the media, it tends to affect how people respond to the disaster. Preliminary results suggest that people who live in the area directly affected by the disaster are more likely to donate to relief efforts when they hear the disaster talked about in humanized language, but people from outside of the affected area are not impacted by humanized language. But again, these results are still a work in progress and are not yet peer-reviewed. This research started out with the feeling that the way the media portrays these disasters might not be helping relief efforts, and it seems that could be possible. If we can answer this question definitively, it could inform how the media should cover future storms to hopefully help relief efforts more effectively.
What does a career in Environmental Psychology look like?
After my program is over I’ll have several great options available. I could become faculty at a university and continue to do research. I would also be interested in working for an organization such as the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) that conducts research on energy saving behavior in the workplace and at home, or I could work for a government agency if the US government has a Behavioral Insights Team (“Nudge Unit”) again by the time I graduate.
What are some of the key skills for success in this role?
I have a master’s in Environmental Management from Duke and having that depth of knowledge about climate change and sustainability is key. In my current program I don’t need to know how to do climate research, but I do need to know how to prioritize my projects and determine where the opportunities are in the sustainability space. It’s very important to be knowledgeable about the systems that contribute to climate change so that I can research the behaviors that are most impactful.
What is your favorite part of your job?
I get to ask the questions that are most relevant to learning about what makes people behave environmentally and then answer them! Every project I work on teaches us things we’ve never known before about human environmental behavior.
What is the hardest part of your job?
Research is key to the process of becoming more sustainable as a society, but I’m not the one on the front lines implementing sustainability projects. Sometimes I stress myself out about climate change being an emergency and feel like I need to do more, faster, but I can balance doing important research on a longer-term time scale with doing advocacy in the short term in my spare time to address that.
What was your path to this role?
When I was applying to my master’s program I thought I wanted to end up in a Chief Sustainability Officer role or perhaps work for a city government or at a university. While I was at Duke I got to work in both the Duke and Durham sustainability offices and did some energy behavior research. I realized that my skill set is a better fit for the research side of things, it’s what I love and really want to do. A lot of implementation work is very people-focused and requires convincing others of the value of sustainability work, but my personality and skills are more suited to behind the scenes thinking and problem investigating.
What’s your advice to someone interested in a role like this?
Talk to people doing research in the field to find out what you like and dislike and get research experience first before doing a PhD program. If there’s anyone genuinely interested in this field I’d be more than happy to talk with them, the combination of sustainability and psychology is a relatively small field and I could help them evaluate programs and find good people to work with.
What are your favorite resources?
There’s a book called Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change by George Marshall which is a great introduction to this kind of work. It’s written in a very accessible way to general public about the psychology of how people think about climate change.
There’s another book called What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global Warming: Toward a New Psychology of Climate Action by Per Espen Stoknes and Jorgen Randers. It’s another great, accessible introduction to the psychology of people’s perceptions of climate change.
There are also some very prominent researchers in environmental psychology who are good to follow. There’s a woman at Oberlin College called Cynthia Frantz who does great work and is very influential. My advisor Leaf Van Boven here at University of Colorado Boulder is wonderful, as is his colleague Amanda Carrico. Linda Steg in the Netherlands has written several books, including the intro to Environmental Psychology books.
There are a few journals in this space such as the Journal of Environmental Psychology, and the Journal of Environment and Behavior.
The Behavior Energy & Climate Change Conference is every fall, it’s a great example of academia and industry working together on sustainability behavioral programs. There’s also a big social psychology conference called the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Conference, and they have an incredible pre-conference for sustainability.
Who (or what) is your sustainability hero?
I’d have to say Linda Steg, she’s the researcher in the Netherlands who helped established Environmental Psychology as a field and did a lot of the beginning influential work on the topic. I really love what she does.
