Inspiring Sustainable Behaviour

What is the answer to inspiring sustainable behaviour? It starts with a question – or nineteen. With this simple and inspiring guide you'll learn how to ask for persistent, pervasive, and near-costless change by uncovering our hidden quirks, judgmental biases, and apparent irrationalities. The only change you'll need to make is how you ask.

Businesses, larger or small, will soon have to cut costs and cut carbon, irrespective of the products they sell, or the services they perform. National government has structural policy and legislative needs, and local government has implementation and documentation needs. Indeed, the new UK government coalition’s approach to transport is simply ‘cut costs and cut carbon’. Set against this there is an increasing sense that popular culture and popular science are congregating around a desire to understand who we are and how we behave. The recent rise of behavioural economics is a testament to this as well as the relevance of environmental psychology. Allied to this is a sense that big business is forging ahead with plans to account for and mitigate carbon emissions without the marketing and communications departments being able to help or communicate this effectively either through their own efforts or those of their communication agencies.

The ‘19 Different Ways to Ask for Change’ offer a solution to all these needs by pulling them together and showing that changing how we ask is near-costless, but its effects could be near-priceless. This book shows that simplification isn’t always the solution, an action can be the most successful question, and a default answer can be the most important. It explores why short-term memory tasks change our behaviour, how singing roads regulate speed, and that commitment gaps change outcomes; how our worry-profile is the same as an Argentinean farmer's, why knowledge of what kills you is irrelevant but asking about behaviour that kills is deadly, and what a chimpanzee’s tea-party tells us about the effect of ownership on decision-making.

This timely book will be of great value to scholars and practitioners whose work relates to reducing carbon emissions with a particular emphasis on environmental psychology, behavioural economics, project design, and psychology. It offers practical solutions for policy makers and professionals in marketing and communications departments.