From Niches to Norms: Drivers and Diffusion of Green Social Tipping

Introduction

How common must a behavior be, before a reluctant person decides to conform? And can information campaigns and behavioral interventions instigate enough change to transition to a new norm with the least disruption? The project addresses these topical questions, contributing key insights to the ecological transition.

Background

The net-zero transition poses unprecedented societal challenges that cannot be tackled with technology and markets alone. It requires behavioral and social change. Abandoning entrenched detrimental norms, including those that perpetuate the fossil-fueled lock-in, is notoriously difficult, preventing change and limiting policy efficacy.

Social Tipping Interventions

A nascent literature tackles Social Tipping Interventions (STI), aiming at cost-effective disproportionate change by pushing behaviors past an adoption threshold beyond which further uptake is self-reinforcing. Intervening on target groups can greatly reduce the societal cost of a policy and thus holds promise for precipitating change. Yet, research in this field is confined to theory or small-scale experiments.

Project Goals

GREEN TIPPING aims to provide an innovative and rigorous analysis of the untapped potential of tailored interventions to scale sustainable behavior and trigger systemic shift. To this end, I plan a four-pronged approach:

1. Posit: Derive predictions on the conditions and timing for abandoning a detrimental social norm.
2. Test: Assess the effectiveness of a battery of interventions on representative multi-country samples to quantify the hypothesized effects.
3. Refine: Adjust target-specific STIs to be tested in controlled group experiments.
4. Validate: Confirm the findings by assessing contagion in the field, focusing on renewable energy adoption in targeted samples elsewhere.

Interdisciplinary Approach

The interdisciplinary approach draws from the natural and social sciences, with transformative theoretical, experimental, and policy advances relevant to environmental and other high-stake challenges.