Make the University Commit to Carbon Neutrality by 2030

The Problem

Currently, the emission of fossil fuels is the single largest contributor to the anthropogenic greenhouse effect (Lehmann, 2007). The IPCC (2013) declared that major social and economic changes will be needed to move towards an economy with low-carbon usage. Thus, it is imperative to reverse the trajectory of global climate change through supporting any kind of policies or initiatives aimed towards combating global climate change (Dickinson, 2009). However, the major challenge we face is the unwillingness of the public to support, and accept any social or political initiatives to combat climate change (Clayton, et al., 2015). Thus, building interpersonal communication is an imperative part of public acceptance and support for social change, which presents local solutions to mitigation and adaptation strategies (Swim, et al., 2014).

Warwick University’s Climate Reality Corps society has been struggling to reach their target of 1500 signatures for their petition to get the University to pledge carbon neutrality by 2030. We thought that they would benefit hugely from our skills acquired throughout this module to encourage more people to be concerned about climate change and resultantly sign their petition. Hence, we targeted University of Warwick students and staff by using behavioural techniques designed to change pluralistic ignorance (the tendency of people to think that they are the only ones who hold a certain opinion about a topic) and promote public recognition of the adverse effects of climate change. We facilitated a realisation that many members of the University cared deeply about its stance on carbon neutrality and that signing the petition to make the University commit to Carbon Neutrality by 2030 would make them an active advocate for change.

We wanted this project to have societal utility lasting longer than the petition deadline, so we developed a unique framework that can be replicated and even scaled to enhance any future persuasion attempted by the society.

Why is it important?

Cambridge City Council declared a Climate Emergency on Thursday 21st February (Flesher, 2019). On 6th February, Sheffield declared a Climate Emergency, becoming the largest council in the UK to do so (Hand, 2019). These changes are happening now! It largely seems like council decisions to declare Climate States of Emergency are driven by petitions, sometimes of a University nature (e.g. Extinction Rebellion secured the decision for Cambridge with a petition of only 2,123 signatures (Flesher, 2019); Rosie Mills, a schoolgirl in Lancaster, created a small petition that caught the eye of University student Millie Prosser who went to council with a petition of 1,530 signatures before eliciting change (Lancaster.ac.uk, 2019)). It seems fair to emulate this narrative of potential future change by supporting the Climate Reality petition here at the University of Warwick.

The story of Lancaster City Council’s decision to declare a climate state of emergency included direct university involvement in the persuasion process. The university petition, created by Millie Prosser, was largely successful through ‘just four days of concentrated effort’ (Prosser in Lancaster.ac.uk, 2019). We took inspiration from this and applied persuasive techniques to be utilised by Climate Reality over numerous days. We developed a network of complementary persuasive elements, including a series of social-media posts, and simultaneous real-life interventions to encourage petition signatures on campus. This multi-faceted approach was designed to be a mechanism for ensuring that this agenda remains in individuals’ frames of reference/consciousness for longer than a customary skim-read allows, utilising the availability heuristic via a multi-day presence.

‘Radical social change is uncomfortable and difficult- but I believe that as local representatives of our communities we have a responsibility to take leadership’

- Councillor Fairman, Cornwall in Cornwall.Gov.UK, 2019

Target Audience

Our target audience were members of Warwick University, the largest segment of which being students. We tailored this project to target students by using Facebook, one of the most prominent social media platforms used by the demographic (Rankin, Truskey & Chisolm, 2019). We exploited pre-existing prominent Facebook groups in order to publicise the petition. Many potential petition-signers scroll mindlessly through Facebook (McKelvey & Hunt, 2019), so we decided to use the peripheral route described by the Elaboration Likelihood Model (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986) to increase the chance of the message being adequately conveyed. In addition to this, we used Just Asking and Foot-in-the-door techniques to gain petition signatures from university lecturers. We also ‘Just Asked’ students in combination with the Similarity Effect, aiming to exploit the shared student experience, achieved by mirroring them to an extent.

Psychological and persuasion techniques used:

The Facebook Posts

When consulting with the Climate Reality marketing department, we proposed some ideas outlining the techniques we were planning to use and we had to overcome some issues as the society were unhappy with the usage of negativity we initially proposed. We’d initially planned to used a post shown below:

• ‘You can recycle your cardboard and turn off lights you’re not using, but relative to corporate behaviour, the effects of doing so are negligible. Recycling an aluminum can will save enough energy to power a lightbulb for x minutes, but this benefit would be massively offset by one large organisation that doesn’t make the same effort as you. If Warwick Uni was a person they’d leave the water running as they brush their teeth, and not double check if their sandwich wrapper should be put in the organic food waste bin. Use the greatest power we have over climate-change and sign this petition so as a collective we can twist Warwick’s arm and stop it from maliciously targeting baby polar bears :)’

… and presented to them the following justification:

This post takes advantage of the widely observed negativity bias (Rozin & Royzman, 2001) and uses it to attract attention and create a group-mentality, pitting students as a Samson against the Goliath university and then providing them a slingshot in the form of a petition. It attempts to elicit cognitive dissonance by provoking self-doubt about the efficacy of one’s efforts against climate change. It would be easier to sign a petition to reduce this cognitive dissonance and maintain cognitive consistency than to change one’s beliefs about oneself, and the individual is likely to take the fastest easiest route to reduce cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957)

Nevertheless they believed it did not follow their ethos so therefore, neglecting what is presented within the negativity effect we focused on techniques which draw upon more positive influence.

Post 1:

• ‘It’s clear now, we all know that science shows that there's no denying climate change is real and it's a huge threat to pretty much everything.’

Within this post we’ve used acknowledgement of the Deficit Model of Science Communication and instead of stating scientific facts (which we know is of little use) have, in a way, done the opposite. We acknowledged the science was there, yet put little weight upon this and by doing so indicates that it is something that is unquestionable. It's a fact which we no longer need to justify with facts or figures. We then did so in a manner where we used the Similarity Altercast through the language we used, keeping it colloquial using words/phrases like ‘pretty much everything’. By doing so students feel as if they're conversing with other students like themselves, a similarity between the target and influencer which Berscheid (1966) show is effective in increasing influence.

Post 2:

• ‘You don't want to look back in 10 years and wish you’d signed THIS petition while you still had the chance to make an impact, to stop what could be a pretty bleak future for all of us.’

(What will be posted on behalf of Climate Reality)

This post aimed to use the ‘Steve Jobsian principles’ to illicit the Fear of Being Left Behind by stating that student doesn't want to have wished they had done something while they still had the chance. This is also exploiting the growing idea of FOMO (fear of missing out), an increasing trend among smartphone users, and by doing so plays on their own insecurities. (Przybylski, et al., 2013).

Post 3:

• ‘Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol, Sheffield and Lancaster have already declared a Climate Emergency. Don’t you agree we at Warwick University should too? YOU hold the key to a spiralling of change. So why not try?’

Asch (1951; 1955) demonstrated just how large of a role conformity plays in human behaviour. Social influence is so strong that it can ‘override’ logic, common sense, or what is known by an individual to be true. In this post, the aim was to act upon this desire for conformity by listing councils that have been successful in declaring a state of Climate Emergency. As shown by Asch (1955), the size of the ‘majority’ or group stating one opinion does have an effect on the likelihood for an additional individual to conform to it, however effects of conforming do not appear to require a mass of individuals and, for this reason, the list is kept to just five of the 38 UK councils to have done so (Climate Emergency Declaration, 2019). Because conformity appears higher when the ‘majority’ does not consist of outgroup members (Bond and Smith, 1996), this post focuses on councils that have large universities within them. In this sense, it acts upon the persuasion techniques of similarity and social proof (Cialdini, 2000).

Post 4:

• ‘Don’t you want to be a part of this rally like your fellow 576 peers do?’

Climate Corps Reality has already succeeded in getting 576 signatures for the petition from students to make the university commit to carbon neutrality by 2030. We used this number to our advantage to increase the signatures for the petition through using the persuasion technique of efficacy. This technique essentially involves providing descriptive and provincial norms. These norms display how others have behaved in the same situation and hence influence judgements of people about what behaviour is appropriate (Bohner and Schluter, 2014). Hence, it is the concept of finding role models for the self/behaviour which makes behaviour change more likely. This made students more likely to sign up because they felt they felt a sense of moral duty since so many other students had already done so. Hence, they shared provincial norm with them which is being a student themselves. Thus, this sharing of social identity worked to our advantage with more students signing up as a result.

Intervention: Door-in-the-face, Foot-in-the-door and Just Asking

We developed an advanced door-in-face technique, where we asked for an effortful favour, a ‘big ask’ in the form of asking them to hand out flyers, and creating a feeling of discomfort for the target. We then released the pressure of the situation by just asking them only to scan the QR code for the petition with their phone. Relieved by the easy nature of the task they become more susceptible to the pro-social rewards associated with compliance. We yielded 100% success with this strategy.

(Figure.1 Increased compliance following ‘big ask’)

We used just asking, asking lecturers in their offices to sign the petition, and students around the university campus (see photos below). Interestingly enough, numerous times lecturers would sign without being fully aware of what they were signing to. This is really illustrative of how easy it is to ‘hack’ someone, as our default is usually to say yes. Here, the petition (in our opinion) was for greater good, however it did make us very aware of how this could be exploited for bad. Imagine if the petition was for something extremely detrimental like ‘kick women out of Warwick University’, the ease of which people will not only do what you ask, but believe you when you tell them that it will be ‘doing good’. We used this multiple times and were rarely questioned as to what this ‘good’ we were doing was. It was also interesting to observe, when asking students, the variance in compliance and surprise across cultures within the University. We found that students from more collectivist cultures were far more likely to sign than those who emphasise the individual (Cialdini et al,. 1999).

Once signed, we then asked if these teachers would put a poster on their door to allow for other students who visit their office to see the poster and increase the frequency of exposure the message - to sign the petition. This is based on the idea that once someone has agreed to a smaller request, the likelihood of complying to a larger request which they initially would not have agreed to outright (Freedman & Fraser, 1966; Burger, 1999).

Future of the Project

The framework that we developed was designed to offer a cluster of empirically supported behaviour-change techniques that Climate Corps Reality could digest, understand and then replicate. The signatures that we solicited acted as proof of concept, and CCR were impressed that a team of 4 could generate such results in a period of 4 days. The techniques we outlined can be utilised by a much bigger team over a longer time-scale for much greater results, and CCR now have the information needed to make that happen whenever they need to persuade for change.

However, our framework is not limited to use by a single campus society. We believe that by forming a synchronised inter-university network of teams using our technique, national attention can be attracted. This is a powerful vision, one that could be used to collectivise motivated students and apply significant pressure on those facilitating large-scale environmental negligence. If even 50% of universities in the UK used our framework simultaneously, it would create widespread student awareness in an explosively short period of time and could hence have a knock-on effect permeating other corners of society. Such awareness could be easily measured with petitions, social media ‘trending’ tags or even by mass-media attention.

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