Hannah Peplinski reflects on Psychology of Environmental Stewardship

00:01 Hi everyone. My name is Hannah Peplinski and I consent to record and share this interview with the public community. This interview is being conducted for Psychology561, the psychology of environmental Stewardship, and I'll just be talking about course concepts and different things that I learned. So I'll start off with just reflecting back on the course and some meaningful concepts that I learned. So some of the most meaningful concepts that I learned from this course were psychological reactance, norms and issue framing. The potential for psychological reactance after implementing interventions intended to positively change behavior is a very important thing to understand before taking strong action. This class discussed how any intervention can hyperfocus attention and alter prior justifications for doing behavior, especially if it is a strong intervention. This can result in psychological reactance which can actually lead to a decreasing of the frequency of behavior, complete future avoidance, and even creative misbehavior. This would be displayed in the examples of people that are trying to be encouraged to recycle, but instead of effectively recycling, they throw trash in the recycling to mess with the whole system instead of complying with the actual intervention. The influence of norms was also highly important to understand before implementing behavioral interventions. So this would be understanding both the behavioral expectations of one's community as well as the constructs of the issue that the individuals have formed. This can provide an interventionist with strong leverage points for behavioral adoption, so this would include using influential figures, language, or social groups to push an intervention forward. Finally, the influence of issue framing and fear appeals is important for developing large scale messaging that can positively influence the desired population. By understanding what the motivations are for the community of interest, what they care about, and how they are specifically impacted by the issues at hand, one can create messaging that will initiate positive, efficient, and lasting behavior changes. However, when utilizing such tactics, one must also be aware that this could result in destitution, amplified worry, and decreased level of trust. If it's not utilized correctly now, we will move on to what behavior change strategies worked well, what didn't, and why. The specific behavior change strategies that worked best for our specific intervention in Ann Arbor on the food system was the establishment of community social groups, resource sharing initiatives and utilizing education based strategies to progress small farming initiatives. These techniques utilized the influence of social norms and knowledge sharing to progress behavior change adoption. Because these techniques decreased economic and informational barriers that were heavily associated with the adoption of local farming initiatives, behavioral adoption was both expediated and viewed positively. This included using cooking classes and having an available shed of tools that our community members could utilize to progress their local farming initiatives. Strategies that did not work well in this community were fear based marketing techniques. An example was our public bulletin that highlighted all the ways that life would change for the people of Ann Arbor if human induced climate change was not controlled. Instead of motivating populations, the distribution of information highlighting the threat of climate change on the community sent many people into distress rather than action. This is because these techniques were used prematurely and that they were implemented before our team was able to supply community members with the tools and resources to make them feel empowered and change. Using these techniques as a source of intermittent intervention could have been used to stabilize motivation rather than using it to initiate it. Now I'll move on to two to five salient concepts that I will use in my career that I gained from this course. As I pursue a career in environmental policy, I plan to utilize my developed understanding of how people interact with specific types of behavioral interventions to implement policies that can be logistically adopted. I hope to utilize an understanding of knowledge and attitudes towards the environmental issues that I'm hoping to combat with policies that both appeal to and strengthen the population of interest. Instead of implementing policies that utilize complex or emotionally charged language, I will use terms and concepts that are broadly understood within the community to enhance adoption through trust and understanding. Because this concept aids in directly appealing to the populations of interest, it is likely to have more durability. This is because those impacted by this intervention will both understand and internalize it on a higher level than if it's not utilized. This concept also utilizes meaningfulness because when intervention when individuals understand an intervention, they're also able to connect to it on a personal level. As I hope to specifically influence the food system, I plan to use the behaviorist paradigm to influence the adoption of sustainable agricultural management practices with influential extrinsic motivation. Farmers are the backbone of our entire system, but they are often limited by both finances and education. Adopting new practices this is because changing planting, harvesting, or processing techniques requires a lot of additional knowledge as well as additional time or technology that may not be readily available. If implemented using the guidelines proposed, this strategy would have the speed of change because people that are influenced by these policies would be highly motivated by the additional finances available to them. As more farmers adopted these strategies in line with this policy, they would also create a new social norm which would solidify the strategies within the system. Additionally, if the extrinsic motivation used intermittent intervention tactics, it would also have durability. This is as long as the financial incentives were available and sufficient. However, it is possible that without continuous encouragement for change and the adoption of new strategies. Mental vitality would stand in the way of these interventions.

08:15 Success.

08:16 This is because people could begin to forget the purpose of the intervention or their place within it without an interventionist reminding them. Finally, I hope to use the principles of justification and commitment to encourage new members of the sustainable agricultural movement to continue utilizing and expanding upon their techniques after the initial interventions. This can be accomplished by building community groups that share and encourage one another to adopt practices that will serve the health of their community. Policies can then be implemented to encourage the growth of these systems as well as their breadth of impact. Now I will evaluate a few different tactics with one or two evaluation metrics. And that's just what I just did. So the different evaluation metrics are speed of change Reliability Particularism Durability Mental vitality meaningfulness, Emotional state perspection Now I will talk about one or two major ways that the approaches outlined in this course differ from conventional behavior change approaches. The the major ways that the approaches of this course differ from the conventional behavior change approaches is that they recognize how flawed the human population is and how they may not always positively respond to approaches that may seem relatively straightforward from the outside. Interventions must be intentional both within the time and the space that they are implemented, as well as intentional regarding the population of interest. This course did not highlight one best method or even propose the best strategy for finding the right method, but instead insists that many trials and errors will have to occur before finding techniques that have sufficient and lasting effects. If interventionists are afraid of potential failure, they will likely be unable to find strategies that work best for their community. We found this to be true as we implemented the local agricultural strategies within Ann Arbor. Several interventions were initiated to influence the food system before we found a network of solutions that worked for our community. For example, using experts outside of Ann Arbor to instruct the local cooking classes and farming classes reduced behavioral adoption. This is because trust and teamwork proved to be highly important to the people we were trying to connect with. Therefore, training our own neighbors ended up being both impactful and a lasting intervention. Thank you for your time.