The side effects of green soft policies

Picard, Julien (2024) The side effects of green soft policies. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

We act pro-socially to make up for past wrongs, uphold our personal beliefs, get social approbation, or enjoy the warm-glow feeling of helping out. Pro-social soft policies tap into these motives to foster selfless deeds. Still, we know little about how soft policies change behaviour. In the introductory chapter of this dissertation, I endeavour to explain why understanding mechanisms is important. I also lay out my approach to studying them in this thesis. In Chapter 2, I create an economic model that rationalises "behavioural spillovers", i.e., the within-individual effect of doing a pro-social action on one’s likelihood to do another. I show that pro-social policies weaken or amplify this spillover effect depending on the psychological mechanism through which they induce behaviour change. Thus, estimating such second-order effects can shed light on mechanisms. A key application of this theory lies in tackling global warming. In Chapter 3, I study if eating less meat — an individual action with high mitigation potential — induces us to do more for the environment. I also assess whether promoting vegetarian choices with social norm nudges amplifies or weakens this spillover effect. Using an online experiment (n=2775), I find that when the social norm succeeds in promoting vegetarianism, it is at the cost of crowding out this willingness to do more. This "crowding-out" effect suggests that social norm messaging induces people to act out of extrinsic motivations (e.g., to temper social pressure). Chapter 4 explores how two narratives used by politicians or environmental activists to promote environmental activism can foster or hinder further engagement. The first triggers guilt from not doing enough by stressing the negative consequences of inaction. The second triggers pride from doing the right thing by stressing the benefit of climate action. I test their effectiveness in a large survey experiment (n=10,670). None of these approaches work in promoting pro-environmental actions. Putting these results in perspective with Chapter 3, I draw some implications for the design of pro-environmental soft policies. I conclude this thesis by reflecting on my research practices in Chapter 5.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2024 Julien Picard
Library of Congress subject classification:	G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GE Environmental Sciences H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General)
Sets:	Departments > Geography and Environment
Supervisor:	Dugoua, Eugenie and Dumas, Marion and Mourato, Susana
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4637

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