As corporations backtrack on their climate commitments, carbon dioxide levels continue to rise and our planet breaks new high temperature records, it’s more important than ever to share what we are doing – personally and collectively – to prevent climate change from getting worse.
In some cases, words can actually speak louder than actions. The concept of doing good out loud is championed by Jan Willem Bolderdijk, an alumnus of our department and currently a professor at the University of Amsterdam.
In his inaugural lecture there, Bolderdijk described two different kinds of people that can do good out loud:
People who are already doing green things – like eating a primarily plant-based diet or buying second hand clothes – but don’t talk about it can preach what they already practice.
People who want to behave more sustainably, but are unable to do so because of the context they live in (i.e. lack of cycling infrastructure to enable biking to work).
The power of words
Bolderdijk identified one big barrier that stands in the way of people speaking up about their pro-environmental values: the tendency to fixate on environmentally-harmful action, and to forget the power of words.
The assumption that unless people aren’t constantly doing or talking about eco-friendly things, then they do not care about the environment and don’t want to act sustainably, can help maintain a damaging status quo of environmentally-harmful systems.
Showing that most people either want to make, or are already making, greener choices can mobilize others, because they don’t see their lone actions as a small drop in the bucket, but rather as part of a widely supported collective action.
Speaking out about our desire to behave more pro-environmentally also makes clear to elected officials that we, their constituents, support policies that would make it easier for us to act on our values.
Removing barriers
This is also the core of a barrier-first approach to environmental motivation, which our colleagues Elliot Sharpe and Linda Steg articulated in a recent paper. Sharpe and Steg say that people failing to act on their values is often – wrongly – seen as a lack of interest in going greener.
Instead, they posit that people are prevented from acting on their values by existing systems, and they encourage policy makers to listen when people tell them what those barriers are, and to remove them.
They describe pro-environmental motivation as a river that is always flowing toward pro-environmental action, but each person’s river has different obstacles – for example, lack of access to public transport making it hard for people to give up their cars – which stand in their way. If these obstacles are removed, then people are able to behave in accordance with their values.
Feeling at liberty to speak up about our green intentions and values, and what prevents us from following through on them, matters to our sense of feeling that we can act on our values, and identify what is stopping us from doing so.
Do-gooders dilemma
The basic idea behind doing good out loud is to potentially inspire other to do the same and thereby increase the impact of your own actions. If you go vegan or just eat less meat, you are decreasing your personal carbon emissions. But if you tell other people that you are eating less meat, and they start thinking that’s the thing to do so they start doing it too, then that’s even better for the planet because it’s an even bigger reduction in emissions.
A recent study by the municipality of Amsterdam suggests that people who see sustainable behavior happening around them, or people who talk about sustainable behavior in their own social circle, are likelier to behave more pro-environmentally themselves. This was also found in a paper by Bolderdijk and Gert Cornelissen from 2022: “How do you know someone’s vegan?” They won’t always tell you. An empirical test of the do-gooder’s dilemma”.
The researchers determined that there was a causal relationship between vegans and vegetarians being willing to publicly express their meat-free preferences and feeling like they had allies who endorsed eating a more plant-based diet:
“Vegan and vegetarian participants avoided signing a petition that promoted veg*an food options after a majority of confederates had declined to do so. When the experimenter endorsed veg*an food options, however, participants went against the majority, and did sign the petition. Together, these findings point to a pivotal role for exemplars and institutions: by signaling that there are allies who endorse a meat-free diet, they may liberate vegetarians and vegans to publicly express their deviant, meat-free preferences, and thus speed up wider societal change.”
The municipality of Amsterdam study suggests that social interaction helps to normalize and spread green actions, and posits that it is can have as much impact as raising awareness about sustainability and climate change. In her paper “Changing environmental behavior from the bottom up: the formation of pro-environmental social identities”, our colleague Lise Jans drew a similar conclusion. She found that community actions, like a clean up day or a local energy project, can be a catalyst for large-scale change. These actions can change people’s identity, specifically their social identity, which are the values and goals that we internalize from our fellow group members.
A 2022 paper by our colleagues Thijs Bouman and Linda Steg – “A spiral of (in)action: Empowering people to translate their values in climate action” – explained that far more people care about nature and the environment than we often think, and having a sense that we are not the only ones putting effort into protecting the environment and preventing climate change makes us feel more motivated to keep doing it, and to do even more. The more you demonstrate that you care and are taking action, the more others will be inspired to do the same.
Part of the reason why some people may hesitate to be vocal about their pro-climate action was explored in a 2023 paper, by Namkje Koudenburg and Jans. They identified that some people fear being seen as annoying if they talk about being vegan or the other things that they do in their own lives to use less of earth’s resources. No one wants to come across as a braggard who’s virtue signaling to seem like a better person.
With that in mind, it is actually unsurprising that research has found that vegetarians are not, in fact, constantly preaching about their plant-based diet. In their 2022 paper, Bolderdijk and Cornelissen concluded that vegetarians often self-silence. Contrary to popular belief, they won’t always tell you that they don’t eat meat. This is a phenomenon known as the do-gooder’s derogation:
“Going against the norm can be socially costly, and invite a range of social sanctions, even when deviants are motivated by virtuous principles that observers agree with.”
That is why, in his inaugural lecture, Bolderdijk encouraged people to risk being considered a little bit smug for the sake of publicizing that they are choosing to do pro-environmental things. Individuals can mobilise their friends, colleagues, customers, and students and make systemic change possible.
However, this requires them to express their struggles and green values and intentions publicly. In a paper by Bolderdijk and Jans in 2021 – “Minority influence in climate change mitigation” – the researchers found that “pro-environmental minorities can pave the way towards ‘tipping points’ and spontaneous social change”, and “policymakers can speed up this process by offering top-down support for minorities – by giving them ‘voice’.”
To that end, in his lecture, Bolderdijk implored behavioural scientists to examine the words people use in the real world, because they can give insights about what barriers are standing in our way. The context of where we live should not be stopping us from going green, but if we only focus on (unsustainable) behavior instead of how much they say they want to behave sustainably, we underestimate people’s willingness to do so.
Words matter
And he has taken his own advice: in a paper out earlier this year, University of Groningen PhD candidate Greta Zella (together with co-authors Bolderdijk, Tommaso Caselli and Saskia Peels-Matthey) studied how much the specific words we use to describe climate change and climate behavior really matter. The researchers looked at neologisms – new words or expressions – connected to climate change, like “flight shame” and “green washing”, and analysed how they can either facilitate or frustrate the onset of social tipping points, or sustainable change.
Talking about flying less, or even just the desire to do so, can make a difference. Many people would rather avoid air travel, but if there is no valid alternative, they have to fly in order to get where they need to go. Continued high airline ticket sales could be interpreted as a sign that people are unwilling to stop flying, but the reality is more nuanced: many people would prefer to take other modes of transport because they care about the environment, but they can’t because those alternatives are unavailable.
The term “flight shame” can help people to express their ambivalence about air travel, and the coining and usage of that term can have a strong evocative impact on policy makers: it illustrates to them that people are indeed taking flights, but that they simultaneously want their government to invest in better rail networks and connections.
To put it simply, the term “flight shame” is an easy and short way to express that you are still flying even though you are concerned about the climate, which can help to break through pluralistic ignorance (where the majority subscribes to an opinion they do not actually believe because they wrongly assume that it’s what everyone else thinks, whereas in reality it is actually a minority view).
The words we use, who we say them to, and how often we say them can be a form of climate action unto themselves. Even if all we are doing is expressing our concern about climate change, and our desire to avoid making it worse, that is already paving the way for others to see that they are not alone. And that’s a good place to start.
